d filled his cabinets with relics from this monster crypt;
here and there a philosopher had pondered over them--questioning whether
perchance they had once been alive, or whether they were not mere
abortive souvenirs of that time when the fertile matrix of the earth was
supposed to have

"teemed at a birth
Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms,
Limbed and full grown."

Some few of these philosophers--as Robert Hooke and Steno in the
seventeenth century, and Moro, Leibnitz, Buffon, Whitehurst, Werner,
Hutton, and others in the eighteenth--had vaguely conceived the
importance of fossils as records of the earth's ancient history, but the
wisest of them no more suspected the full import of the story written
in the rocks than the average stroller in a modern museum suspects the
meaning of the hieroglyphs on the case of a mummy.

It was not that the rudiments of this story are so very hard to
decipher--though in truth they are hard enough--but rather that the
men who made the attempt had all along viewed the subject through an
atmosphere of preconception, which gave a distorted image. Before this
image could be corrected it was necessary that a man should appear who
could see without prejudice, and apply sound common-sense to what he
saw. And such a man did appear towards the close of the century, in the
person of William Smith, the English surveyor. He was a self-taught man,
and perhaps the more independent for that, and he had the gift, besides
his sharp eyes and receptive mind, of a most tenacious memory. By
exercising these faculties, rare as they are homely, he led the way to
a science which was destined, in its later developments, to shake the
structure of established thought to its foundations.

Little enough did William Smith suspect, however, that any such dire
consequences were to come of his act when he first began noticing the
fossil shells that here and there are to be found in the stratified
rocks and soils of the regions over which his surveyor's duties led him.
Nor, indeed, was there anything of such apparent revolutionary character
in the facts which he unearthed; yet in their implications these facts
were the most disconcerting of any that had been revealed since the days
of Copernicus and Galileo. In its bald essence, Smith's discovery was
simply this: that the fossils in the rocks, instead of being scattered
haphazard, are arranged in regular systems, so that any given stra