THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



Hitherto such bones, when not entirely ignored^ had 

 been for the most part ascribed to giants of former days, 

 or even to fallen angels. Cuvier soon showed that 

 neither giants nor angels were in question, but ele- 

 phants of an unrecognized species. Continuing his 

 studies, particularly with material gathered from g} 7 p- 

 sum beds near Paris, he had accumulated, by the begin- 

 ning of our century, bones of about twenty-five species 

 of animals that he believed to be different from any now 

 living on the globe. 



The fame of these studies went abroad, and presently 

 fossil bones poured in from all sides, and Cuvier's con- 

 victions that extinct forms of animals are represented 

 among the fossils was sustained by the evidence of many 

 strange and anomalous forms, some of them of gigantic 

 size. In 1816 the famous Ossemenls Fossiles, describing 

 these novel objects, was published, and vertebrate paleon- 

 tology became a science. Among other things of great 

 popular interest the book contained the first authorita- 

 tive description of the hairy elephant, named by Cuvier 

 the mammoth, the remains of which had been found 

 embedded in a mass of ice in Siberia in 1802, so wonder- 

 fully preserved that the dogs of the Tungusian fisher- 

 men actually ate its flesh. Bones of the same species 

 had been found in Siberia several years before by the 

 naturalist Pallas, who had also found the carcass of a 

 rhinoceros there, frozen in a mud bank ; but no one then 

 suspected that these were members of an extinct popula- 

 tion they were supposed to be merely transported relics 

 of the flood. 



Cuvier, on the other hand, asserted that these and the 

 other creatures he described |had lived and died in the 

 region where their remains were found, and that most 



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