OF ANIMALS. 



181 



diUused, though in a subordinate and less precise degree, over every part of 

 the body. It is possible, therefore, in animals that appear endowed with 

 particular senses without particular organs for their residence, that these 

 senses are diffused, like that of touch, over the surface generally ; though 

 there can be no doubt, that, for want of such appropriate organs, they must 

 be less acute and precise than in animals that possess them.* 



But who of us can say what is possible ? who of us can say what has act- 

 ually been done ? Alter all the assiduity with whicii this attractive science 

 has been studied, from the time of Aristotle to that of Lucretius, or of 

 Pliny, and from these periods to the piesent day, — alter all ihe wonderful 

 and important discoveries which have been developed in it, natural history 

 is even yet but little more than in its infancy, and zoonomy is scarcely en- 

 titled to the name of a science in any sense. New varieties and species, 

 and even kinds of beings, are still arising to our view among animals, 

 among vegetables, among niinerals : — new structures are detecting in those 

 already known, and new laws in the apphcation of their respective powers. 



But the globe has been upturned from its foundation ; and with the 

 wreck of a great part of its substance has intermingled the wreck of a 

 great part of its inhabitants. It is a most extraordinary fact, that of the five 

 or six distinct layers or strata of which the solid crust of the earth is found 

 to consist, so far as it has ever been dug into, the lowermost or granitic, as 

 we observed on a former occasion,] contains not a particle of animal or ve- 

 getable materials of any kind ; the second, or transition formation, as Wer- 

 ner has denominated it, is filled, indeed, with fossil relics of animals, but 

 of animals not one of which is to be traced in a living state in the present 

 day ; and it is not till we ascend to the third, or floetz stratification, that we 

 meet with a single organic remain of known animal structures. 



M. Cuvier has been engaged for the last fifteen years in forming a classi- 

 fication, and establishing a museum of nondescript animal fossils, for the 

 purpose of deciding, as far as may be, the general nature and proportion 

 of those tribes that are now lost to the world : and in the department of 

 quadrupeds alone, his collection of unknown species amounted in the year 

 1810 to not le?s than seventy-eight, some of which he has been obliged to 

 arrange under new genera, as we shail have occasion to notice sail further 

 in a subsequent study. In the new and untried soil of America, the bones 

 of unknown kinds and species lie buried in profusion ; and my late friend, 

 Professor Barton, of Philadelphia, one of our first transatlantic physiologists, 

 informed me by letter a short time before his death, that they are perpetu- 

 ally turning up skeletons of this description, whose living representatives 

 are no where to be met with. 



In few words, every region has been enriched with wonders of animal life 

 that have long been extinct for ever. Where is now that enormous mam- 

 moth, whose bulk outrivalled the elephant's ?| where that gigantic tapir, of 

 a structure nearly as mountainous,| whose huge skeleton has been found in 

 a fossil state in France and Germany ; while its only living type, a pigmy 

 of what has departed, exists in the wilds of America ? where is now the 

 breathing form of the fossil sloth of America, the magalonix of Cuvier, 

 whose size meted that of the ox ?| where the mighty monitor,^ outstripping 

 the lengthened bulk of the crocodile ? itself too, a lord of the ocean, and yet, 

 whose only relics have been traced in the quarries of Maestricht ; to which, 



* stud, of Med. Vol. iv. p. 14. edit. 2a, 1825, t Ser, L Lect, YL v. 61. 

 t Sen II. L*5ct, IL 



