skulls of the existing species which enabled him for the first time
to make the necessary comparisons between the extinct and living
species. A few years later (1780) Blumenbach confirmed Camper's
identification, and gave the name of _Elephas primigenius_ to the
Siberian mammoth.

"Beckman" [says Blainville] "as early as 1772 had even published a
very good memoir on the way in which we should consider fossil
organic bodies; he was also the first to propose using the name
_fossilia_ instead of _petrefacta_, and to name the science which
studies fossils _Oryctology_. It was also he who admitted that these
bodies should be studied with reference to the class, order, genus,
species, as we would do with a living being, and he compared them,
which he called _prototypes_,[91] with their analogues. He then
passes in review, following the zooelogical order, the fossils which
had been discovered by naturalists. He even described one of them as
a new species, besides citing, with an erudition then rare, all the
authors and all the works where they were described. He did no more
than to indicate but not name each species. Thus he was the means of
soon producing a number of German authors who made little advance
from lack of anatomical knowledge; but afterwards the task fell into
the hands of men capable of giving to the newly created palaeontology
a remarkable impulse, and one which since then has not abated."

Blumenbach,[92] the most eminent and all-round German anatomist and
physiologist of his time, one of the founders of anthropology as well as
of palaeontology, had meanwhile established the fact that there were two
species of fossil cave-bear, which he named _Ursus spelaeus_ and _U.
arctoideus_. He began to publish his _Archaeologia telluris_,[93] the
first part of which appeared in 1803.

From Blainville's useful summary we learn that Blumenbach, mainly
limiting his work to the fossils of Hanover, aimed at studying fossils
in order to explain the revolutions of the earth.

"Hence the order he proposed to follow was not that commonly
followed in treatises on oryctology, namely, systematic, following
the classes and the orders of the animal and vegetable kingdom, but
in a chronological order, in such a way as to show that the classes,
so far as it was possible to conjecture with any probability, were
established after or in consequence of the different revolutions of
the eart