412 PALAEONTOLOGY. 



numerous and various Herbivora of the newer tertiary periods. 

 A brief description has alread}^ been given of some of the 

 singular forms, the genera of which are extinct, that lived in 

 eocene and miocene times. 



Genus G-alecynus, Ow. — In 1829 the fossil skeleton of a 

 Carnivore, of the size of a fox, was discovered by Sir Eoderick 

 I. Murchison in the pliocene schist of (Eningen. On a close 

 comparison of this specimen, the writer finds that the first 

 premolar is smaller, and the third and fourth larger than in 

 the fox, and all the teeth are more close-set and occupy a 

 smaller space than in the genus Ganis ; the bones of the feet 

 are more robust ; and these, with other characters, indicate 

 an extinct genus intermediate between Ganis and Viverra* 

 The unique specimen is now in the British Museum. 



Genus Felis, L. — As it is by this form of perfect Carnivore 

 that Cuvier chiefly illustrated his principle of the correlation 

 of animal structures, it will be exemplified more particularly 

 in this place, and by the aid of the subjoined cut (fig. 160). 

 The founder of palaeontology thus enunciates the law which 

 he believed to guide effectively his labours of reconstructing 

 extinct species : — 



" Every organized being forms a whole, a single circum- 

 scribed system, the parts of which mutually correspond and 

 concur to the same definitive action by a reciprocal re-action. 

 None of these parts can change without the others also 

 changing, and consequently each part, taken separately, indi- 

 cates and gives all the others." t 



Cuvier did not predicate that law by an a priori method : 

 he arrived at it inductively, and after many dissections had 

 revealed to him the following facts — the size and shape of the 

 piercing, lacerating, and trenchant teeth ; the mechanism of 

 the retractile claws, and of the joints of the limb that wielded 



* See Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. iii., 1847, p. 55. 

 f Ossemens Fossiles, 4to, torn. i. (1812), p. 58. 



