CHAPTEE ni 

 THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



EVER since Leonardo da Vinci first recognized the 

 true character of fossils, there had been here and there 

 a man who realized that the earth's rocky crust is one 

 gigantic mausoleum. Here and there a dilettante had 

 filled his cabinets with relics from this monster crypt ; 

 here and there a philosopher had pondered over them 

 questioning whether perchance they had once been alive, 

 or whether they were not mere abortive souvenirs of 

 that time when the fertile matrix of the earth was sup- 

 posed to have 



"teemed at a birth 



Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, 



Limbed and full-grown." 



Some few of these philosophers as Robert Hooke and 

 Steno in the seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz, 

 Buffon, Whitehurst, Werner, Hutton. and others in the 

 eighteenth had vaguely conceived the importance of 

 fossils as records of the earth's ancient history, but the 

 wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the 

 story written in the rocks than the average stroller in a 

 modern museum suspects the meaning of the hieroglyphs 

 on the case of a mummy. 



88 



