5480 Zoology : its present Fhasis 



was in reality his view; but he always clung to or returned to it, and 

 towards the close of life more obstinately than ever. A German 

 by race, a French citizen by the accident of birth, but, above all, 

 an anatomist, sceptical in the highest degree, disbelieving what 

 he could not see and touch, he held in extreme dislike the pan- 

 theistic doctrines of Southern or Sclavonic Germany, their inventors 

 and supporters. To him the transcendental in any form was odious ; 

 and if anything could bring the dead from the tomb it would be the 

 announcement that his anaplotherium was really nothing more than 

 an overgrown baby-ruminant; that much-doated-on skeleton which it 

 was so easy for him to prove belonged neither to a horse nor an ass, 

 a pig or deer, an ox or buffalo, a tapir or rhinoceros, nor anything 

 now alive, or which had lived since man began to notice the differ- 

 ence between a horse and a pig, an era assuredly of no mean date, — 

 that sheleton which, being explained or interpreted, created Palae- 

 ontology, bestowing on Cuvier an immortal fame. Whilst Cuvier 

 lived no transcendentalist had ever ventured thus to assail the very 

 basis of the doctrine of the great anatomist. 



Palaeontology derives much of its importance from this, — that many 

 more species and genera of animate beings have been destroyed than 

 now exist. Zoologists admit as lost forty thousand species of shell- 

 fish, forty species of the pachydermata, and one elephant at least ; of 

 hippopotami seven or eight species have been lost, besides reptiles 

 and fishes innumerable. Now, in what light are these lost species 

 and extinct genera to be viewed ? Under what aspect are they to be 

 intercalated with the living ? If intercalated as DeBlainville pro- 

 poses, they fill up the gaps in the scale, and out of the living and the 

 extinct, the present and the past, is formed one great chain of beings. 

 This unity, this scale of beings, Cuvier denied. Assumed by Bonnet 

 and Buffbn to exist, its rigorous demonstration was attempted by 

 DeBlainville, a descriptive anatomist equal to Cuvier himself. Giving 

 up as untenable, 1st, the successive creations of Cuvier, and, 2nd, the 

 simultaneous formation and creation of all species at first (a doctrine 

 hinted at by DeBlainville), as doctrines disproved at once by palaeon- 

 tological research, there remain still to be accounted for the existence 

 of certain species and genera in time and space, and the appearance 

 on the earth of species and genera which at one time did not exist. 

 If the descent of the living from the extinct cannot be proved in one 

 form or another, the doctrine of the unity of the scale of beings is a 

 doctrine not worth maintaining. There cannot be two modes of crea- 

 tion or formation of animals, — two principles working the machinery 



