A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



Cuvier and Smith were exact contemporaries, both 

 men having been born in 1769, that "fertile year" 

 which gave the world also Chateaubriand, Von Hum- 

 boldt, Wellington, and Napoleon. But the French nat- 

 uralist was of very different antecedents from the Eng- 

 lish surveyor. He was brilliantly educated, had early 

 gained recognition as a scientist, and while yet a young 

 man had come to be known as the foremost compara- 

 tive anatomist of his time. It was the anatomical 

 studies that led him into the realm of fossils. Some 

 bones dug out of the rocks by workmen in a quarry 

 were brought to his notice, and at once his trained eye 

 told him that they were different from anything he had 

 seen before. 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 elephants of an unrecognized species. Continuing 

 his studies, particularly with material gathered from 

 gypsum beds near Paris, he had accumulated, by the 

 beginning of the nineteenth 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- 

 viction 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 Ossements Fossiles, 

 describing these novel objects, was published, and ver- 

 tebrate paleontology became a science. Among other 

 things of great popular interest the book contained the 



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