NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



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 deluge had dis- 

 solved 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, be- 

 coming 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 

 plesiosaurus by Conybeare, had been found in deeper 

 strata of British rocks ; and these, as well as other mon- 

 sters whose remains were unearthed in various parts 

 of the world, bore such strange forms that even the 

 most sceptical could scarcely hope to find their counter- 

 parts among living creatures. Cuvier's contention that 

 all the larger vertebrates of the existing age are known 

 to naturalists was borne out by recent explorations, 

 and there seemed no refuge from the conclusion that 

 the fossil records tell of populations actually extinct. 

 But if this were admitted, then Smith's view that there 

 have been successive rotations of population could no 



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