[95] Sur les ossemens qui se trouvent dans le gyps de Montmartre (Bulletin des sciences pour la Société philomatique, tomes 1, 2, 1798, pp. 154–155).
[96] The following account is translated from the fourth edition of the Ossemens fossiles, vol. 1., 1834, also the sixth edition of the Discours, separately published in 1830. It does not differ materially from the first edition of the Essay on the Theory of the Earth, translated by Jameson, and republished in New York, with additions by Samuel L. Mitchell, in 1818.
[97] In the first edition of the Théorie he says fifteen years, writing in 1812. In the later edition he changed the number of years to thirty.
[98] De Blainville is inclined to make light of Cuvier’s law and of his assumptions; and in his somewhat cynical, depreciatory way, says:
“Thus for the thirty years during which appeared the works of M. G. Cuvier on fossil bones, under the most favorable circumstances, in a kind of renascence of the science of organization of animals, then almost effaced in France, aided by the richest osteological collections which then existed in Europe, M. G. Cuvier passed an active and a comparatively long life, in a region abounding in fossil bones, without having established any other principle in osteology than a witticism which he had been unable for a moment to take seriously himself, because he had not yet investigated or sufficiently studied the science of organization, which I even doubt, to speak frankly, if he ever did. Otherwise, he would himself soon have perceived the falsity of his assertion that a single facet of a bone was sufficient to reconstruct a skeleton from the observation that everything is harmoniously correlated in an animal. It is a great thing if the memory, aided by a strong imagination, can thus pass from a bone to the entire skeleton, even in an animal well known and studied even to satiety; but for an unknown animal, there is no one except a man but slightly acquainted with the anatomy of animals who could pretend to do it. It is not true anatomists like Hunter, Camper, Pallas, Vicq-d’Azyr, Blumenbach, Soemmering, and Meckel who would be so presuming, and M. G. Cuvier would have been himself much embarrassed if he had been taken at his word, and besides it is this assertion which will remain formulated in the mouths of the ignorant, and which has already made many persons believe that it is possible to answer the most difficult and often insoluble problems in palæontology, without having made any preliminary study, with the aid of dividers, and, on the other hand, discouraging the Blumenbachs and Soemmerings from giving their attention to this kind of work.”
Huxley has, inter alia, put the case in a somewhat similar way, to show that the law should at least be applied with much caution to unknown forms:
“Cuvier, in the Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe, strangely credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others, with the invention of a new method of palæontological research. But if you will turn to the Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles, and watch Cuvier not speculating, but working, you will find that his method is neither more nor less than that of Steno. If he was able to make his famous prophecy from the jaw which lay upon the surface of a block of stone to the pelvis which lay hidden in it, it was not because either he or any one else knew, or knows, why a certain form of jaw is, as a rule, constantly accompanied by the presence of marsupial bones, but simply because experience has shown that these two structures are coördinated” (Science and Hebrew Tradition. Rise and Progress of Paleontology 1881, p. 23).
[99] History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery (1879).
[100] The following statement of Cuvier’s views is taken from Jameson’s translation of the first Essay on the Theory of the Earth, “which formed the introduction to his Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles,” the first edition of which appeared in 1812, or ten years after the publication of the Hydrogéologie. The original I have not seen, but I have compared Jameson’s translation with the sixth edition of the Discours (1820).
[101] Cuvier, in speaking of these revolutions, “which have changed the surface of our earth,” correctly reasons that they must have excited a more powerful action upon terrestrial quadrupeds than upon marine animals. “As these revolutions,” he says, “have consisted chiefly in changes of the bed of the sea, and as the waters must have destroyed all the quadrupeds which they reached if their irruption over the land was general, they must have destroyed the entire class, or, if confined only to certain continents at one time, they must have destroyed at least all the species inhabiting these continents, without having the same effect upon the marine animals. On the other hand, millions of aquatic animals may have been left quite dry, or buried in newly formed strata or thrown violently on the coasts, while their races may have been still preserved in more peaceful parts of the sea, whence they might again propagate and spread after the agitation of the water had ceased.”