THE CENTURY'S PEQGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



IrrEngland the interest thus aroused was sent to fever- 

 heat in 1821 by the discovery of abundant beds of fossil 

 bones in the stalagmite-covered floor of a cave at Kirk- 

 dale, Yorkshire, which went to show that England too 

 had once had her share of gigantic beasts. Dr. Buck- 

 land, the incumbent of the recently established chair of 

 geology at Oxford, and the most authoritative English 

 geologist of the day, took these finds in hand and showed 

 that the bones belonged to a number of species, including 

 such alien forms as elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, 

 and hyenas. He maintained that all of these creatures 

 had actually lived in Britain, and that the caves in which 

 their bones were found had been the dens of hyenas. 



The claim was hotly disputed as a matter of course. 

 As late as 1827 books were published denouncing Buck- 

 land, Doctor of Divinity though he was, as one who had 

 joined in an " unhallowed cause," and reiterating the old 

 cry that the fossils were only remains of tropical species 

 washed thither by the deluge. That they were found 

 in solid rocks or in caves offered no difficulty, at least 

 not to the fertile imagination of Granville Penn, the 

 leader of the conservatives, who clung to the old idea 

 of Woodward and Cattcut that the deluged ha dissolved 

 the entire crust of the earth to a paste, into which the 

 relics now called fossils had settled. The caves, said 

 Mr. Penn, are merely the result of gases given off by 

 the carcasses during decomposition great air-bubbles, 

 so to speak, in the pasty mass becoming caverns when 

 the waters receded and the paste hardened to rocky 

 consistency. 



But these and such like fanciful views were doomed 

 even in the day of their utterance. Already in 1823 other 

 gigantic creatures, christened ichthyosaurus and plesio- 



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