CUVIER’'S WORK IN PALAONTOLOGY. Si 
very far from paying any regard to these correct assertions 
of a simple and healthy human understanding; it was 
not till the end of the last century that it was generally 
accepted, in consequence of the foundation of the Neptunian 
geology by Werner. 
The foundation of a more strictly scientific paleontology, 
however, belongs to the beginning of our century, when 
Cuvier published his classic researches on petrified Verte- 
brate animals, and when his great opponent, Lamarck, made 
known his remarkable investigations on fossil Invertebrate 
animals, especially on petrified snails and clams. In Cuvier’s 
celebrated work “On the Fossil Bones” of Vertebrate animals 
—principally of mammals and reptiles—we see that he had 
already arrived at the knowledge of some very important 
and general -palzontological laws, which are of great con- 
sequence to the history of creation. Foremost among them 
stands the assertion that the extinct species of animals, 
whose remains we find petrified in the different strata of 
the earth’s crust, lying one above another, differ all the 
more strikingly from the still living kindred species 
of animals the deeper those strata lie—in other words, the 
earlier the animals lived in past ages. In fact, in every per- 
pendicular section of the stratified crust of the earth we 
find that the different strata, deposited by the water in a 
certain historical succession, are characterized by different 
petrifactions, and that these extinct organisms become more 
like those of the present day the higher the strata lie ; in 
other words, the more recent the period in the earth's 
history in which they lived, died, and became encrusted by 
the deposited and hardened strata of mud. 
However important this general observation of Cuvier’s 
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