Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

Secondly, these repositories of organic remains are subject to infinitely greater doubts, than the bones themselves. The same formation may appear recent in places where it shews itself at the surface, and ancient in those where it is covered by the beds which have succeeded it. Ancient formations may have been transported by partial inundations, and thus have covered recent bones; they may have fallen upon them by crumbling, and thus have enveloped and mingled them with the productions of the ancient sea, which they previously contained. Bones of ancient periods may have been washed out by the waters, and afterwards enveloped in recent alluvial formations. Lastly, recent bones may have fallen into the fissures or caverns of ancient rocks, and been enveloped by stalactites or other incrustations. In every individual instance, therefore, it becomes necessary to analyze and appreciate all those circumstances which might disguise the real origin of fossil remains; and it rarely happens that people who have collected bones have been themselves aware of this necessity, the consequence of which has been, that the true characters of their geological position have been almost always neglected or misunderstood.

Thirdly, there are some doubtful species, which must occasion more or less uncertainty in the results of our researches, until they have been clearly ascertained. Thus the horses and buffaloes that occur along with the elephants, have not yet received appropriate specific characters; and such geologists as are disinclined to adopt the different epochs which I have endeavoured to establish with regard to fossil bones, may, for many years to come, draw from thence an argument against my system, so much the more convenient as it is contained in my own work.

But allowing that these epochs are liable to some objections, from such as may only consider some particular case, I am not the less satisfied, that those who shall take a comprehensive view of the phenomena, will not be checked by such inconsiderable and partial difficulties, and will be led to conclude, as I have done, that there has been at least one, and very probably two, successions in the class of quadrupeds, previous to that which at the present day peoples the surface of the earth.

Proofs that the Extinct Species of Quadrupeds are not varieties of the presently existing Species.

I now proceed to the consideration of another objection, one, in fact, which has already been urged against me.

Why may not the presently existing races of land quadrupeds, it has been asked, be modifications of those ancient races which we find in a fossil state; which modifications may have been produced by local circumstances and change of climate; and carried to the extreme difference which they now present, during a long succession of ages?

This objection must appear strong to those especially who believe in the possibility of indefinite alteration of forms in organised bodies; and who think that, during a succession of ages, and by repeated changes of habitudes, all the species might be changed into one another, or might result from a single species.

Yet to these persons an answer may be given from their own system. If the species have changed by degrees, we ought to find traces of these gradual modifications. Thus, between the palæotheria and our present species, we should be able to discover some intermediate forms; and yet no such discovery has ever been made.

Why have not the bowels of the earth preserved the monuments of so strange a genealogy, if it be not because the species of former times were as constant as ours; or, at least, because the catastrophe which destroyed them, had not left them sufficient time for undergoing the variation alleged?

In order to reply to those naturalists who acknowledge that the varieties of animals are restrained within certain limits fixed by nature, it would be necessary to examine how far these limits extend. This is a very curious inquiry,—highly interesting in itself, under a variety of relations, and yet one that has been hitherto very little attended to.