THE COASTS OF SICILY. 67 



different constellations, and finally binding together 

 their thousand families by simple and multiplied links, 

 in the same manner as it has rendered the worlds 

 which people space dependent one upon the other. 



The doctrines that we here advocate, received, 

 some years since, a brilliant confirmation, which 

 utterly excludes all doubt. Palaeontology, that 

 science which dates from Cuvier as its founder, but 

 whose progress has been at once sure and rapid, has 

 arrived by an independent course of investigation at 

 absolutely similar results, deduced from the study of 

 the order of succession of animals from the most 

 ancient geological periods to our own day. 



In truth, life has not glided along the surface of the 

 globe by gradual and, as it were, concealed steps, by 

 the intervention of beings, which at first were of the 

 simplest structure, and gradually became more per- 

 fected, until they, in their turn, gave birth to still 

 more perfect animals. The animal kingdom does 

 not present one sole and progressive mode of deve- 

 lopment, as has been conjectured by the naturalists 

 whose views we oppose. On the contrary, from 

 the very beginning, we find that there must have 

 been simultaneously present the four fundamental 

 groups which, even at the present day, include the 

 entire mass of created animals ; for we find that the 

 Vertebrata, Articulata, Mollusca, and Radiata, are 

 buried side by side in the ancient fossil beds of the 

 earlier world. 



Even more than this, the three inferior sub-divi- 

 sions possessed at that remote period representatives 

 of almost all existing classes ; and if it is otherwise 



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