NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



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 unim- 

 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 pyra- 

 mid. These ancient hosts, it was said, have been exter- 

 minated at intervals of odd millions of years by the re- 

 currence 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 Revolutions du Globe) is ominous of catastro- 

 phism, 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, 

 Reliquice Diluviana, or Proofs of a Universal Deluge. 



Both these authorities supposed the creatures whose 

 rr mains 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 



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