The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology
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horse's grinder may be as sure that it had one complete toe on
each foot and did not ruminate; but if ruminants and horses were
extinct animals of which nothing but the grinders had ever been
discovered, no amount of physiological reasoning could have
enabled us to reconstruct either animal, still less to have
divined the wide differences between the two. Cuvier, in the
"Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe," strangely
credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others,
with the invention of a new method of palaeontological research.
But if you will turn to the "Recherches sur les Ossemens
Fossiles" and watch Cuvier, not speculating, but working, you
will find that his method is neither more nor less than that of
Steno. If he was able to make his famous prophecy from the jaw
which lay upon the surface of a block of stone to the pelvis of
the same animal which lay hidden in it, it was not because
either he, or any one else, knew, or knows, why a certain form
of jaw is, as a rule, constantly accompanied by the presence of
marsupial bones, but simply because experience has shown that
these two structures are co-ordinated.


The settlement of the nature of fossils led at once to the next
advance of palaeontology, viz. its application to the
deciphering of the history of the earth. When it was admitted
that fossils are remains of animals and plants, it followed
that, in so far as they resemble terrestrial, or freshwater,
animals and plants, they are evidences of the existence of land,
or fresh water; and, in so far as they resemble marine
organisms, they are evidences of the existence of the sea at the
time at which they were parts of actually living animals and
plants. Moreover, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it
must be admitted that the terrestrial or the marine organisms
implied the existence of land or sea at the place in which they
were found while they were yet living. In fact, such conclusions
were immediately drawn by everybody, from the time of Xenophanes
downwards, who believed that fossils were really organic
remains. Steno discusses their value as evidence of repeated