heresy in the early
days of the nineteenth century.

CUVIER AND FOSSIL VERTEBRATES

But once discovered, William Smith's unique facts as to the succession
of forms in the rocks would not down. There was one most vital point,
however, regarding which the inferences that seem to follow from
these facts needed verification--the question, namely, whether the
disappearance of a fauna from the register in the rocks really implies
the extinction of that fauna. Everything really depended upon the answer
to that question, and none but an accomplished naturalist could answer
it with authority. Fortunately, the most authoritative naturalist of the
time, George Cuvier, took the question in hand--not, indeed, with the
idea of verifying any suggestion of Smith's, but in the course of his
own original studies--at the very beginning of the century, when Smith's
views were attracting general attention.

Cuvier and Smith were exact contemporaries, both men having been born in
1769, that "fertile year" which gave the world also Chateaubriand, Von
Humboldt, Wellington, and Napoleon. But the French naturalist was of
very different antecedents from the English surveyor. He was brilliantly
educated, had early gained recognition as a scientist, and while yet a
young man had come to be known as the foremost comparative anatomist of
his time. It was the anatomical studies that led him into the realm of
fossils. Some bones dug out of the rocks by workmen in a quarry were
brought to his notice, and at once his trained eye told him that they
were different from anything he had seen before. Hitherto such bones,
when not entirely ignored, had been for the most part ascribed to
giants of former days, or even to fallen angels. Cuvier soon showed
that neither giants nor angels were in question, but elephants of an
unrecognized species. Continuing his studies, particularly with material
gathered from gypsum beds near Paris, he had accumulated, by the
beginning of the nineteenth century, bones of about twenty-five species
of animals that he believed to be different from any now living on the
globe.

The fame of these studies went abroad, and presently fossil bones poured
in from all sides, and Cuvier's conviction that extinct forms of animals
are represented among the fossils was sustained by the evidence of many
strange and anomalous forms, some of them of gigantic size. In 1816
the famous Ossements Fossiles, describing these novel objects, was
p