mes, and even in our
own day, some people who have been opposed to the acceptance of any
portion of the doctrine of evolution have actually defended the view that
the things called fossils were never the shells or bones of animals living
in bygone times, but that they only simulate such things and have been
created as such together with the layers of rock from which they may have
been taken. If we employed the same arguments in dealing with the broken
fragments of vases and jewelry taken from the Egyptian tombs or from the
buried ruins of Pompeii, we would have to believe that such pieces were
created as fragments and that they were never portions of complete
objects, just because no one alive to-day has ever seen the perfect vessel
or bracelet fashioned so long ago. Common sense directs us to discard such
a fantastic interpretation in favor of the view that fossils are what they
seem to be--simply relics of creatures that lived when the earth was
younger.

Until this common sense view was adopted there was no science of
palaeontology. Cuvier was the first great naturalist to devote particular
attention to the mainly unrelated and unverified facts that had been
discovered before his time. He was truly the originator of this branch of
zooelogy, for he brought together the observations of earlier men and
extended his own studies widely and surely, emphasizing particularly the
necessity for noting carefully the geological situation of a fossil in
rocks of an older or later period of formation. His great result was the
demonstration that many groups of animals existed in earlier ages that
seem to have no descendants of the same nature to-day, and also that many
or most of our modern groups are not represented in the earliest formed
sedimentary rocks, although these recent forms possess hard parts which
would surely be present somewhere in these levels if the animals actually
existed in those times. But the meaning of these facts escaped Cuvier's
mind. He was a believer in special creation, like Linnaeus and all but a
few among his predecessors, and he explained the diversity of the faunas
of different geological times in what seems to us a very simple and naive
way. In the beginning, he held, when the world was created, it was
furnished with a complete set of animals and plants. Then some great
upheaval of nature occurred which overwhelmed and destroyed all living
creatures. The Creator then, in Cuvier's view, proceeded to c