As early as 1764, Hollmann[90] had admirably identified the bones of a rhinoceros found in a bone-deposit of the Hartz, although he had no skeleton of this animal for comparison.
Pallas, in a series of memoirs dating from 1773, had discovered and distinguished the species of Siberian elephant or mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the large species of oxen and buffalo whose bones were found in such abundance in the quaternary deposits of Siberia; and, as Blainville says, if he did not distinguish the species, it was because at this epoch the question of the distinction of the two species of rhinoceros and of elephants, in the absence of material, could not be solved. This solution, however, was made by the Dutch anatomist Camper, in 1777, who had brought together at Amsterdam a collection of skeletons and 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 zoölogical 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 palæontology 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 palæontology, had meanwhile established the fact that there were two species of fossil cave-bear, which he named Ursus spelæus and U. arctoideus. He began to publish his Archæologia 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 earth.
“Thus, as we see, all the great questions, more or less insoluble, which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and even discussed by the celebrated professor of Göttingen as early as 1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays of M. G. Cuvier; the errors of distribution in the classes committed by Blumenbach were due to the backward state of geology.”
The political troubles of Germany, which also bore heavily upon the University of Göttingen, probably brought Blumenbach’s labors to an end, for after a second “specimen” of his work, of less importance than the first, the Archæologia telluris was discontinued.
The French geologist Faujas,[94] who also published several articles on fossil animals, ceased his labors, and now Cuvier began his memorable work.
The field of the labors and triumphs of palæontology were now transferred to France. We have seen that the year 1793, when Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were appointed to fill the new zoölogical chairs, and the latter had in 1795 called Cuvier from Normandy to Paris, was a time of renascence of the natural sciences in France. Cuvier began a course of lectures on comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History. He was more familiar than any one else in France with the progress in natural science in Germany, and had felt the stimulus arising from this source; besides, as Blainville stated, he was also impelled by the questions boldly raised by Faujas in his geological lectures, who was somewhat of the school of Buffon. Cuvier, moreover, had at his disposition the collection of skeletons of the Museum, which was frequently increased by those of the animals which died in the menagerie. With his knowledge of comparative anatomy, of which, after Vicq-d’Azyr, he was the chief founder, and with the gypsum quarry of Montmartre, that rich cemetery of tertiary mammals, to draw from, he had the whole field before him, and rapidly built up his own vast reputation and thus added to the glory of France.
His first contribution to palæontology[95] appeared in 1798, in which he announced his intention of publishing an extended work on fossil bones of quadrupeds, to restore the skeletons and to compare them with those now living, and to determine their relations and differences; but, says Blainville, in the list of thirty or forty species which he enumerates in his tableau, none was apparently discovered by him, unless it was the species of “dog” of Montmartre, which he afterward referred to his new genera Palæotherium and Anaplotherium. In 1801 (le 26 brumaire, an IX.) he published, by order of the Institut, the programme of a work on fossil quadrupeds, with an increased number of species; but, as Blainville states, “It was not until 1804, and in tome iii. of the Annales du Muséum, namely, more than three years after his programme, that he began his publications by fragments and without any order, while these publications lasted more than eight years before they were collected into a general work”; this “corps d’ouvrage” being the Ossemens fossiles, which was issued in 1812 in four quarto volumes, with an atlas of plates.