Marie-Henri Ducrotay de Blainville. 205 
that ardent controversy respecting all the arguments on 
which Cuvier founded the new science of Paleontology. 
The first germ of this surprising science of lost beings is 
to be found in an old belief—that of a great ancient deluge. 
Invain scholastic philosophy pretends that fossil shells were 
nothing more than freaks of nature, jeux de la nature. In 
vain the philosopher Voltaire, who, for reasons anything but 
philosophical, would not on any account that there had been 
a deluge, multiplies the number of pilgrims to explain the 
dispersion of marine shells; neither freaks of nature nor 
pilgrims could answer the purpose. Supported by evidence 
of the fact, and by unextinguishable tradition, the common 
sense of men protested against such explanations. 
In the seventeenth century, the attention which had been 
excited by fossil shells, was directed to the gigantic bones pre- 
served in the bowels of the earth, whose first origin was 
equally concealed. 
In 1696, some bones of an elephant were discovered in the 
principality of Gotha. The Grand-Duke immediately assem- 
bled the council of learned men; the council unanimously 
declared that they were jeux de la nature. 
About the same time some of the bones of the animal we 
now call the Mastodon, were found in Dauphiné, one of our 
own provinces. 
A surgeon of that country bought these bones, and had 
them conveyed to Paris, where he exhibited them for money, 
affirming in a pamphlet, that they were taken from a tomb 
30 feet long, and that they were the remains of a giant, king 
of one of the barbarous people who were defeated near the 
Rhone by Marius. All Paris was anxious to see this trophy 
of Marius’ glory; and, according to their almost invariable 
practice, after believing at first all that was told them, they 
soon sneered at all they had believed. 
The eighteenth century at last brought on the serious study 
of such objects. Gmelin and Pallas make us acquainted with 
the fossil bones of Siberia ; they inform us that. such bones 
are found there in prodigious abundance, some of them being 
those of a Rhinoceros, others belonging to an elephant, and 
gigantic ruminants. 
