NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



bitterly antagonized. For a long generation after the 

 discovery was made, the generality of men, prone as 

 always to strain at gnats and swallow camels, preferred 

 to believe that the fossils, instead of being deposited in 

 successive ages, had been swept all at once into their 

 present positions 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 the nineteenth century. 



CUVIER AND FOSSIL VERTEBRATES 



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, re- 

 garding which the inferences that seem to follow from 

 these facts needed verification the question, namely, 

 whether the disappearance of a f auna from the register 

 in the rocks really implies the extinction of that fauna. 

 Everything really depended upon the answer to that 

 question, and none but an accomplished naturalist 

 could answer it with authority. Fortunately, the most 

 authoritative naturalist of the time, George Cuvier, 

 took the question in hand not, indeed, with the idea 

 of verifying any suggestion 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 gen- 

 eral attention. 



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