THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



beings now extinct, how have all these creatures been 

 destroyed ? That question, however, seemed to present 

 no difficulties. It was answered out of hand by the 

 application of an old idea. All down the centuries, 

 whatever their varying phases of cosmogonic thought, 

 there had been ever present the idea that past times 

 were not as recent times; that in remote epochs the 

 earth had been the scene of awful catastrophes that 

 have no parallel in "these degenerate days." Naturally 

 enough this thought, embalmed in every cosmogonic 

 speculation of whatever origin, was appealed to in 

 explanation of the destruction of these hitherto un im- 

 agined hosts, which now, thanks to science, rose from 

 their abysmal slumber as incontestable, but also as silent 

 and as thought -provocative as Sphinx or pyramid. 

 These ancient hosts, it was said, have been exterminated 

 at intervals of odd millions of years by the recurrence 

 of catastrophes of which the Mosaic deluge is the latest, 

 but perhaps not the last. 



This explanation had fullest warrant of scientific au- 

 thority. Cuvier had prefaced his classical work with a 

 speculative disquisition whose very title (Discours sur les 

 devolutions du Globe) is ominous of catastrophism, and 

 whose text fully sustains the augury. And Buckland, 

 Cuvier's foremost follower across the Channel, had gone 

 even beyond the master, naming the work in which he 

 described the Kirkdale fossils, Reliquiae Diluviance, or 

 Proofs of a Universal Deluge. 



Both these authorities supposed the creatures whose 

 remains they studied to have perished suddenly in the 

 mighty flood whose awful current, as they supposed, 

 gouged out the modern valleys, and hurled great blocks 

 of granite broadcast over the land. And they invoked 



