THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



ages, had been swept all at once into their present posi- 

 tions by the current of a mighty flood and that flood, 

 needless to say, the Noachian deluge. Just how the 

 numberless successive strata could have been laid down 

 in orderly sequence to the depth of several miles in one 

 such fell cataclysm was indeed puzzling, especially after 

 it came to be admitted that the heaviest fossils were not 

 found always at the bottom ; but to doubt that this had 

 been done in some way was rank heresy in the early 

 days of our century. 



ii 



But once discovered, William Smith's unique facts as 

 to the succession of forms in the rocks would not down. 

 There was one most vital point, however, regarding 

 which the inferences that seem to follow from these 

 facts needed verification the question, namely, whether 

 the disappearance of a fauna from the register in the 

 rocks really implies the extinction of that fauna. Every- 

 thing really depended upon the answer to that question, 

 and none but an accomplished naturalist could answer it 

 with authority. Fortunately the most authoritative nat- 

 uralist of the time, Georges Cuvier, took the question in 

 hand not, indeed, with the idea of verifying any sug- 

 gestion of Smith's, but in the course of his own original 

 studies at the very beginning of the century, when 

 Smith's views were attracting general attention. 



Cuvier and Smith were exact contemporaries, both 

 men having been born in 1769, that "fertile year" 

 which gave the world also Chateaubriand, Yon Hum- 

 boldt, Wellington, and Napoleon. But the French nat- 

 uralist was of very different antecedents from the Eng- 



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