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discovery of fossil bones in the gypsum quarries of Paris, by 

 tbe workmen, who considered them human remains ; the care- 

 ful study of these relics by Cuvier, and his restorations from 

 them of strange beasts that had lived long before, is a story 

 with which you are all familiar. Cuvier was the first to prove 

 that the earth had been inhabited by a succession of different 

 series of animals, and he believed that those of each period 

 were peculiar to the age in which they lived. 



In looking over his work after a lapse of three-quarters of a 

 century, we can now see that Cuvier was wrong on some 

 important points, and failed to realize the direction in which 

 science was rapidly tending. With all his knowledge of the 

 earth, he could not free himself from tradition, and believed in 

 the universality and power of the Mosaic deluge. Again, he 

 refused to admit the evidence brought forward by his distin- 

 guished colleagues against the permanence of species, and used 

 all his great influence to crush out the doctrine of evolution, 

 then first proposed. Cuvier's definition of a species, the domi- 

 nant one for half a century, was as follows : "A species 

 comprehends all the individuals which descend from each 

 other, or from a common parentage, and those which resemble 

 them as much as they do each other." 



The law of " Correlation of Structures," as laid down by 

 Cuvier, has been more widely accepted than almost any thing 

 else that bears his name ; and yet, although founded in truth, 

 and useful within certain limits, it would certainly lead to 

 serious error if applied widely in the way he proposed. 



In his Discourse, he sums this law as follows : " A claw, a 

 shoulder blade, a condyle, a leg or arm bone, or any other bone 

 separately considered, enables us to discover the description of 

 teeth to which they have belonged ; so also reciprocally we 

 may determine the form of the other bones from the teeth. 

 Thus, commencing our investigation by a careful survey of any 

 one bone by itself, a person who is sufficiently master of the 

 laws of organic structure, may, as it were, reconstruct the 

 whole animal to which that bone had belonged." 



