MEMOIR OF DATJBENTON. 
207 
indicating, summarily, the principal discoveries with 
which he enriched certain branches of human know- 
ledge. 
In Zoology, Daubenton has discovered live species of 
Bats and one of Sorex, which had escaped the obser- 
vation of preceding naturalists, although all of them 
pretty common in France. 
He has given a complete description of the species of 
Deer which produces musk, and made some curious re- 
marks on its organization. 
He has described a singular conformation in the 
vocal organs of some foreign birds. 
He is the first who applied the knowledge of com- 
parative anatomy to the determination of species of 
quadrupeds whose remains have been found in a fossil 
state ; and although he has not been always fortunate 
in his conjectures, he has, nevertheless, opened an im- 
portant career for the history of the revolutions of the 
globe ; he has destroyed for ever those ridiculous no- 
tions about giants, which were renewed every time the 
bones of any large animal happened to be disinterred.* 
The most remarkable instance of his discrimination 
in this way, was the determination of a bone, which 
was preserved at Garde-meuble, as the bone of a giant’s 
leg. He perceived, by means of comparative anatomy, 
that this was the bone of a Giraffe, although he had 
never seen that animal, and no figure of its skeleton 
* His papers on the various subjects referred to, will be 
found in the Memoires de VAcademie des Sciences. 
