FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE 279 



As head of the illustrious Ecolc des Fails, he 

 laughed, and set his pupils laughing, over the 

 ^Philosophy of Nature,' characterizing it as 7a 

 tete de la tetc' It is, however, strange that when- 

 ever Cuvier left his anatomical and palaontologi- 

 cal studies for speculation, he was exceptionally 

 unsound; in his embryology he believed in 'evo- 

 lution' versus *epigenesis' ; in his Discours sur les 

 Revolutions sur la Surface du Globe (1825), he 

 advocated the doctrine of catastrophism versus 

 uniformitarianism. As geology began to yield 

 increasingly positive evidence of great successive 

 waves of life, of the extinction of older animal 

 types and the arrival of new unheralded types, 

 he was forced to abandon his original theory of a 

 single creation. As the chief founder of compara- 

 tive anatomy and palaeontology, he introduced 

 the modern conception of palaeontology as past 

 zoology. He first described Anchitherium and 

 pointed out its resemblance to the horse ; this is a 

 form which, perhaps, more than any other, is to- 

 day part of the most convincing fossil testimony 

 of Evolution, yet Cuvier failed to see in it proofs 

 of the 'filiation' hypothesis he was opposing. In 

 fact, according to Deperet,^ 



the ideas of Cuvier on the transformations of the 

 terrestrial faunas in geological times may be summed 



1 Charles Deperet: Les Transformations du Monde Animal. 

 Authorized translation edited by F. Legge in "The International 

 Scientific Series," vol. XCIV, 1909, pp. U, 15. 



