72 TERTIARY SERIES. 



fossil remains. After stating by what slow grees the ca- 

 binets of Paris had been filled with innumerable fragments 

 of bones of unknown animals, from the gypsum quarries of 

 Mont Martre, Cuvier thus records the manner in which he 

 applied himself to the task of reconstructing their skeletons. 

 Having gradually ascertained that there were numerous 

 species, belonging to many genera, " I at length found my- 

 self," says he, " as if placed in a charnel house, surrounded 

 by mutilated fragments of many hundred skeletons, of more 

 than twenty kinds of animals, piled confusedly around me : 

 the task assigned me, was to restore them all to their origi- 

 nal position. At the voice of comparative anatomy, every 

 bone, and fragment of a bone, resumed its place. I cannot 

 find words to express the pleasure I experienced in seeing, 

 as I discovered one character, how all the consequences, 

 which I predicted from it, were successively confirmed ; the 

 feet were found in accordance with the characters an- 

 nounced by the teeth ; the teeth in harmony with those in- 

 dicated beforehand by the feet ; the bones of the legs and 

 thighs, and every connecting portion of the extremities, 

 were found set together precisely as I had arranged them, 

 oefore my conjectures were verified by the discovery of the 

 parts entire : in short, each species was, as it were, recon- 

 structed from a single one of its component elements." (Cu- 

 vier's Ossemens Fossiles, 1812, torn. iii. Introduction, p. 

 3, 4.) 



Thus, by placing before his readers the progress of his 

 discovery, and restorations of unknown species and genera, 

 in the same irregular succession in which they occurred to 

 him, he derives from this disorder the strongest demonstra- 

 tion of the accuracy of the principles which formed his guide 

 throughout the whole inquiry ; the last found fragments con- 

 drming the conclusions he had drawn from those first 

 brought to fight, and his retrograde steps being as nothing, 

 in comparison with his predictions which were verified. 



Discoveries thus conducted, demonstrate the constancy 

 of the laws of co-existence that have ever pervaded all ani- 



