H CUVIER'S VIEWS RESPECTING A FLOOD 



Cuvier, in the Essai Preliminaire appended to his 

 great work, 1 and afterwards (1826) published separ- 

 ately under the title of Discours sur les Revolu- 

 tions de la Surface du Globe, after remarking on 

 the earlier great geological changes marked by breaks 

 in the continuity of life, which he considered had been 

 sudden and catastrophic, goes on to speak of the last 

 as one which " flooded and afterwards left dry our 

 actual continents, or at least a large portion of those 

 at present existing. It- besides left in northern 

 latitudes (Siberia) the carcasses of large quadrupeds 

 embedded in ice, and thus preserved them to the 

 present day with their skin, their hair, and their flesh. 

 If they had not been frozen as soon as they were 

 killed, putrefaction would have caused their decom- 

 position. . . . The event was (in his opinion) sudden, 

 instantaneous, and without any gradation." 



At the time Cuvier wrote, the belief in the im- 

 mutability of species was almost general, and it was 

 therefore a logical conclusion with those who held 

 that opinion, to suppose, as each break in the geological 

 record was attended by the disappearance of old and 

 the appearance of new forms, that the former were 

 destroyed and that the latter were new and successive 

 creations. The doctrine of Evolution removed the 

 difficulty on the score of continuity, while the doctrine 

 of Uniformity was held to be fatal to the belief in 

 catastrophes. It was also the belief of Cuvier and 

 his contemporaries that no human remains ever 

 occurred in a fossil state, and they therefore held the 

 1 Les Ossements Fossiles, 1812 1822. 



