XXII 1 \ I KODUCTION. 



French Revolution), he had outstripped in his merest youth 

 the age he lived in, and rapidly shot beyond that which was to 

 follow. 



Cuvier's early pursuits were the rectification, by mewi* *>[' 

 anatomy, of the classifications of Buffbn and Linne* ; but he 

 quickly, as it were instinctively, passed beyond this com- 

 paratively narrow field into one which has no limits. Whilst 

 pursuing his inquiries on the structure of the invertebrate 

 kingdom, he soon saw that the animal forms he dissected dif- 

 fered specifically and generically from those fossil forms which 

 lay around him. Pallisset, the potter, had seen the same ; 

 Buffon had announced the fact: they were declared to be 

 dreamers. Cuvier offered to mankind the Ossemens Fossiles in 

 proof that they were so, and from that moment to the present 

 day few have bad the hardihood to deny the proof; none but 

 those who regard the Newtonian demonstration as an idle, 

 unprofitable dream. 



The importance thus given to zoological studies and pur- 

 suits by the application of the anatomical method to Zoo- 

 logy, would have commenced and terminated with Cuvier, but 

 for this one circumstance, he had created geology ; that last 

 and most wonderful science, which seems to have no limits. He 

 had shown that without a knowledge of the extinct zoolo- 

 gies there can be no geology, properly speaking ; none at 

 least likely to interest man. Now this extinct Zo6logy cannot 

 be well understood, if at all, without a knowledge of the 

 living zoology, that being the term and mean of comparison. 

 Thus was Zoology forced at last into the schools, universities, 

 and collegiate institutions. 



The necessity for this was first seen and admitted in France, 

 from whence it naturally was imported into England, where 

 Cuvier and his supposed views had become fashionable ; the 

 single geologist at the Board of Ordnance, MacCullough, 

 was slowly replaced by a body of scientific men, each teach- 

 ing a different department of natural science : out of this arose 

 a school of practical geology, and various chairs in a similar 



