CUV1ER AND THE RISE OF PALAEONTOLOGY 95 



this which gives him a lasting and honoured place in 

 the history of biology. 



At the end of the eighteenth century it had been 

 rather grudgingly admitted that some few animals were 

 actually extinct. Buffon was able to quote as indu- 

 bitable examples the mammoth and the mastodon. 

 Their occurrence in countries unknown to the ancients, 

 such as Siberia and North America, disposed of the 

 explanation long clung to by the learned viz., that their 

 bones were the remains of elephants which had been 

 led about by the Roman armies, while their large size 

 and the ease with which they can be recognised rendered 

 it highly improbable that they still survived anywhere 

 on the surface of the globe. 



It was therefore natural that Cuvier's first study in 

 palaeontology should relate to extinct elephants. He 

 compared and distinguished several species, showed 

 that they were distinct from the existing Asiatic and 

 African species, a fact which had escaped the notice of 

 Pallas, and argued from the well-known case of a 

 Siberian mammoth preserved in ice and frozen mud 

 with hardly any decomposition that it must have been 

 overwhelmed by a sudden "revolution of the earth." 

 Whatever we may think of Cuvier's geology, his com- 

 parisons of all known elephants, recent and fossil, intro- 

 duced a new standard of exactness into these inquiries. 

 From this beginning he went on to study all the extinct 

 vertebrates which he could discover in public or private 

 collections. By 1821 he had published elaborate and 

 well-illustrated descriptions of near a hundred extinct 

 animals, an extraordinary output for one investigator. 



The most remarkable of his palaeontological dis- 

 coveries were made at home, in the lower tertiary rocks 

 which underlie the city of Paris. He proved that in 



