43 6 NINETEENTH CENTURY. rr. in. 



apon the earth now. They were all extinct animals. The 

 greater part belonged to hoofed quadrupeds, something 

 like our elephant, rhinoceros, and pig; then there was an 

 elegant deer-like animal resembling a gazelle, some birds, 

 some fish, and a kind of opossum, but all these were in 

 some way different from any which live now. 



Here was a history so strange that at first no one would 

 believe it; for it meant that at the time when the land on which 

 Paris now stands was being laid down by the rivers, there 

 must have existed a whole group of animals, all of them 

 more or less different from our present species of animals, 

 which had not then begun to exist. It had long been 

 known that strange shells were found buried in the earth's 

 crust, but then naturalists could never be sure that some 

 like them might not be living in other parts of the world 

 without our knowing it, and they had always believed 

 that at least the larger animals had been created quite 

 recently at the same time as man. But here were ani- 

 mals which no one had ever seen upon the earth, and 

 it was impossible to suppose that fifty different kinds of 

 creatures of all sizes, some bigger than an elephant, could bo 

 roaming about the world unseen by any one. Therefore 

 there could be no doubt that long before the time of history 

 or tradition strange animals must have lived and died, and 

 have been buried in the deposits now forming part of the 

 earth's crust. 



And when this was once recognised, and attention was 

 called to these buried animals, little by little other forms 

 were found in older rocks in different parts of the world, 

 which appeared to be less and less like living animals the 

 older the rocks were in which they were found. All these 

 Cuvier described in his famous work called Les Ossemens 

 Fossiles,' which he published in 1812, and in which he laid 



