398 NINETEENTH CENTURY. pt. hi. 



mals, were being dug up round about Paris. These were a 

 great puzzle to anatomists, for the bones were many of them 

 immensely large, and none of them seemed to agree exactly 

 with those of any known animals. Cuvier no sooner heard 

 of these fossils than he set to work to study them, making 

 use of his great knowledge of anatomy to sort out the con- 

 fused mass. His practised eye could detect from among 

 the heap of bones those which belonged to each other, and 

 out of a mere handful of fragments he could restore in 

 imagination the animal from which they must have come. 

 It was like the work of an enchanter's wand. 



* At the voice of comparative anatomy,' he writes, ' each 

 bone, each fragment, regained its place. I cannot describe 

 the pleasure I felt in finding that, as I discovered one cha- 

 racter, all its consequences were gradually brought to light ; 

 the feet agreed with the history told by the teeth; the bones 

 of the legs and thighs, and those parts which ought to unite 

 them, agreed with each other. In a word, each one of the 

 species sprang from its own fragments.' 



And so month after month he worked on, and then to 

 the great astonishment of naturalists he told them that 

 all these animals were of species which are found nowhere 

 upon the earth now. They were all extinct animals. The 

 greater part belonged to hoofed quadrupeds, something 

 like our elephant, rhinoceros, and pig ; then there was an 

 elegant deer-like animal resembling a gazelle, some birds, 

 some fish, and a kind of opossum, but all these were in 

 some way different from any which live now. 



Here was a history so strange that at first no one would 

 believe it; for it meant that at the time when the land on which 

 Paris now stands was being laid down by the rivers, there 

 must have existed a whole group of animals, all of them 



