The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology | Page 6

organisation of sharks, and are never found in connection with other
organisms. Why this should be we are not at present in a position even
to imagine; we must take the fact as an empirical law of animal
morphology, the reason of which may possibly be one day found in the
history of the evolution of the shark tribe, but for which it is hopeless to
seek for an explanation in ordinary physiological reasonings. Every one
practically acquainted with palaeontology is aware that it is not every
tooth, nor every bone, which enables us to form a judgment of the
character of the animal to which it belonged; and that it is possible to
possess many teeth, and even a large portion of the skeleton of an
extinct animal, and yet be unable to reconstruct its skull or its limbs. It
is only when the tooth or bone presents peculiarities, which we know
by previous experience to be characteristic of a certain group, that we
can safely predict that the fossil belonged to an animal of the same
group. Any one who finds a cow's grinder may be perfectly sure that it
belonged to an animal which had two complete toes on each foot and
ruminated; any one who finds a 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
alteration of marine and terrestrial conditions upon the soil of Tuscany
in a manner worthy of a modern geologist. The speculations of De
Maillet in the beginning of the eighteenth century turn upon fossils; and
Buffon follows him very closely in those two remarkable works, the
"Theorie de la Terre" and the "Epoques de la Nature" with which he
commenced and ended his career as a naturalist.
The opening sentences of the "Epoques de la Nature" show us how
fully Buffon recognised the analogy of geological with archaeological
inquiries. "As in civil history we consult deeds, seek for coins, or

decipher antique inscriptions in order to determine the epochs of human
revolutions and fix the date of moral events; so, in natural history, we
must search the archives of the world, recover old monuments from the
bowels of the earth, collect their fragmentary remains, and gather into
one body of evidence all the signs of physical change which may
enable us to look back upon the different ages of nature. It is our only
means of fixing some points in the immensity of space, and of setting a
certain number of waymarks along the eternal path of time."
Buffon enumerates five classes of these monuments of the past history
of the earth, and they are all facts