THEORY OF THE EARTH. 9S 



With such means, it was easy for me to multiply 

 my comparisons, and to verify in all their details 

 the applications which I have made of the various 

 laws deducible from such circumstances as have 

 been stated. 



We cannot here enter into a more lengthened 

 detail of this method, and must refer to the 

 large work on Comparative Anatomy, in which 

 all its rules will he found. In the mean time, an 

 intelligent reader may gather a great number of 

 these from the work upon Fossil Bones, if he take 

 the trouble of attending to all the applications of 

 them which we have there made. He will see, 

 that it is by this method alone that we are guided, 

 and that it has almost always sufficed for referring 

 each bone to its species, when it was a living 

 species to its genus, when it was an unknown 

 species to its order, when it was a new genus 

 and to its class, when it belonged to an order 

 not hitherto established and to assign it, in the 

 three last cases, the proper characters for distin- 

 guishing it from the nearest resembling orders, 

 genera, and species. Before the commencement 

 of our researches, naturalists had done no more 

 than this with regard to animals, which they had 

 the opportunity of examining in their entire state. 

 Yet, in this manner, we have determined and 

 classed the remains of more than a hundred and 

 fifty mammiferous and oviparous quadrupeds. 



