8154 



Quadrupeds. 



M. Cuvier, in his Preface to the ' Regne Animal,' justly remarks 

 that " the habit necessarily derived from the study of Natural His- 

 tory, of classing in the mind a great number of ideas, is one of the 

 advantages derived from this science, the least talked of, but which 

 may rank perhaps as the principal, when it shall have been generally 

 introduced into ordinary education. In addition to these advantages 

 derived from the study of Natural History, Geology has the merit of 

 exerting continually the reasoning faculties, in deducing conclusions 

 from numerous data and complicated phenomena, and, although it 

 cannot appeal to demonstrative proof, may often conduct us to moral 

 certainty. It is constantly concerned in weighing a great mass of 

 probable evidence, and is therefore powerfully instrumental in exer- 

 cising the mind and strengthening the judgment. 



In regard to organic fossil remains, we have hitherto been 

 acquainted with very few mammiferous quadrupeds as natives of the 

 British Islands, or as having inhabited them within twenty-three 

 generations. We have now discovered that this part of the earth was 

 once peopled by many other animals of the same class, although we 

 have not yet penetrated beyond the first boundaries of this new 

 region of discovery. 



It is admitted by all naturalists that the animals of our own 

 acquaintance are not mere varieties of fossil species gradually 

 changed by climate and other local circumstances ; and further, 

 that the probability is extremely remote of discovering even a small 

 proportion of the supposed extinct quadrupeds, in a living state, in 

 regions hitherto unexplored. Surprising as the above facts may 

 appear, there are others, relating to the same department of the 

 animal kingdom, which attest far greater changes in the form of the 

 land and the ancient character of its inhabitants. At a yet earlier 

 epoch that part of the globe where the continent of Europe now 

 extends was peopled with a race of terrestrial quadrupeds of an 

 entirely different description, — a race of which most of the genera, 

 and all the species known to us as fossil remains, have been since 

 annihilated. Their skeletons are found entombed in strata evidently 

 deposited in the entrances of rivers and at the bottom of fresh-water 

 lakes, in a manner closely analogous to strata at present in the course 

 of formation in our own lakes and rivers. In the same formation are 

 found the bones of birds and crocodiles, fresh-water tortoises and 

 fish ; nor are shells wanting. The whole of these are either of 

 extinct genera or of unknown species. The plants on which these 

 large herbivorous animals were supported differed as widely as them- 



