te hardened to rocky consistency.

But these and such-like fanciful views were doomed even in the day of
their utterance. Already in 1823 other gigantic creatures, christened
ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus by Conybeare, had been found in deeper
strata of British rocks; and these, as well as other monsters whose
remains were unearthed in various parts of the world, bore such strange
forms that even the most sceptical could scarcely hope to find their
counterparts among living creatures. Cuvier's contention that all the
larger vertebrates of the existing age are known to naturalists was
borne out by recent explorations, and there seemed no refuge from the
conclusion that the fossil records tell of populations actually extinct.
But if this were admitted, then Smith's view that there have been
successive rotations of population could no longer be denied. Nor could
it be in doubt that the successive faunas, whose individual remains have
been preserved in myriads, representing extinct species by thousands
and tens of thousands, must have required vast periods of time for the
production and growth of their countless generations.

As these facts came to be generally known, and as it came to be
understood in addition that the very matrix of the rock in which fossils
are imbedded is in many cases one gigantic fossil, composed of the
remains of microscopic forms of life, common-sense, which, after all,
is the final tribunal, came to the aid of belabored science. It was
conceded that the only tenable interpretation of the record in the rocks
is that numerous populations of creatures, distinct from one another and
from present forms, have risen and passed away; and that the geologic
ages in which these creatures lived were of inconceivable length. The
rank and file came thus, with the aid of fossil records, to realize
the import of an idea which James Hutton, and here and there another
thinker, had conceived with the swift intuition of genius long
before the science of paleontology came into existence. The Huttonian
proposition that time is long had been abundantly established, and by
about the close of the first third of the last century geologists had
begun to speak of "ages" and "untold aeons of time" with a familiarity
which their predecessors had reserved for days and decades.

CHARLES LYELL COMBATS CATASTROPHISM

And now a new question pressed for solution. If the earth has been
inhabited by successive populations of bein