FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE 281 



not exist in the same places, and must have come 

 there from elsewhere. Suppose, for instance, that a 

 great irruption of the sea were to cover the continent 

 of New Holland with a mass of sand; it would bury 

 in it the corpses of kangaroos, phascolomes, dasyures, 

 perameles, flying phalangers, echidnae, and ornitho- 

 rhynci, and would entirely destroy the species of all 

 these genera, since none of them exist in other coun- 

 tries. Let this same cataclysm turn into dry land the 

 numerous small straits which separate New Holland 

 from the continent of Asia, and it will open up a 

 passage to rhinoceroses, buffaloes, horses, camels, 

 tigers, and all the other Asiatic animals, which will 

 thus people a land where they were until then un- 

 known." 



. . . To Cuvier must be ascribed the honour of 

 having stated wuth admirable clearness and exactness 

 the highly important and fruitful hypothesis of the 

 renewal of faunas by migration. 



The school of Cuvier, however, went beyond 

 its master, and Alcide d'Orbigny, d'Archiac, and 

 Louis Agassiz confirmed the theories of Cuvier 

 on the fixity of species and the almost complete 

 renewal of successive faunas. The views of d'Or- 

 bigny may be sunamed up as follows :^ 



From the first to the latest epoch of the animated 

 world we see appear at all points of it, at one and the 



^Charles Deperet: Les Transformations du Monde Animal. 

 Authorized translation edited by F. Legge in "The International 

 Scientific Series," vol. XCIV, 1909, p. 18. 



