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arFeSal. RESEARCHES
On
FOSSIL BONES,
IN WHICH ARE ESTABLISHED
_THE CHARACTERS OF
VARIOUS ANIMALS
WHOSE SPECIES HAVE BEEN DESTROYED
BY THE REVOLUTIONS OF
Che Globe; oe
BY
BARON CUVIER
Great Officer of the Legion of Honour, Counsellor of State, and Member of the
Royal Council of Public Instruction, One of the Forty of the French Academy,
Perpetual Secretary to the Academy of Sciences, Member of the Aca-
demies and Royal Societies of London, Berlin, Petersburgh,
Stockholm, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Gottingen, Turin,
Bavaria, Modena, The Netherlands, Caleutta, and of
the Linnzan Society of London, &c. &e. &c. &e.
FOURTH EDITION,
Rebhiser anv Completed
BY ADDITIONAL NOTES,
AND A
SUPPLEMENT LEFT BY THE AUTHOR.
Triomphante des eaux, du trépas, et du temps,
La terre a cru revoir ses premiers habitans.
t DELILLE.
IN FOUR VOLUMES.
LONDON:
G. HENDERSON, 2, OLD BAILEY, LUDGATE-HILL.
AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS,
1834.
WHITE: a
J. HENDERSON,] { FRIARS
m | =
Fossil Skeleton ofa Plestosaurns, discovered at Lemeh
4,
‘
f
10S:
VOl.L. PU. 2.
Magee, P20 Be wos lapuUey D Lopuoa T
gdkbhy ur saqayul PP? punof urunpy ? uot SIQT up fo UOZILIYS
——
DMO PUSSOL LO SIYIADAS AT SAPLAM
ez hes
son fossil Bones. zv E Ipis. Pit.
Jhketeton of an This from «a Murua found at Thebes a Eqypt
=. Tt =
:
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 4}
Demaillet covered the whole globe with water for thousands of
years ; he caused those waters gradually to retire; all terrestrial ani-
mals had at first been marine ; man himself was at first a fish; and the
. author assures his readers that it is not uncommon to find in the ocean
fishes which have not only become half men, but which will some day
become entire human beings *.
The system of Buffon is only a development of that of Leibnitz,
with the sole addition of a comet, which produced from the sun, bya
violent shock, the liquefied mass of the earth, together with all the
planets : whence result his positive data, for by the actual temperature
of the earth we can calculate how long a time has elapsed since it
grew cool ; and, since the other planets came from the sun at the same
time as the earth, we may reckon how many ages must elapse before
the larger ones cool, and to what extent the smaller ones have become
refrigerated.
The Latest Systems.
In our times imagination has exercised itself with more freedom
than before on this important subject. Some writers have re-produced
‘and greatly extended the ideas of Demaillet; they say that, at first
first everything was in a state of liquefaction ; that the liquid at first
engendered animals of the simplest kind, such as monads and others of
the infusory and microscopic species; that, in progress of time, and in
assuming different habits, the animalia complicated and diversified
their species to the extent which we now have in existence. It is
these animals who have converted the waters of the ocean gradually
into calcareous earth; vegetables, on the origin and changes of which
- they tell us nothing, have changed the water into clay ; but these two
earths, by dint of being deprived of the characteristics which life had
impressed on them, were resolved, by the last analysis, into flint; and
that is the reason why the oldest mountains are the most flinty. All
the solid portions of the earth owe their birth, then, to life, and with-
out life the whole globe would be still wholly liquidt. —
Other writers have given the preference to the theory of Kepler.
Like this great astronomer, they assign vital powers to the globe;
they say that a fluid circulates around it; an assimilation is made as
in animate bodies; each of its component parts has life: not only the
very elementary atoms have instinct and will, which attract and repel
* Telliamed. Amster. 1748.
T Théorie de la terre, 1749; et Epoques de la Nature, 1775.
= See La Physique de Rodig. p.106. Leips. 1801; and p. 169, vol. ii. of Tellia-
med, as well as a great number of German works. M. de Lamarck has, with much
research and talent, developed this system in his ‘‘ Hydrogeology and Zoological Phi-
”
losophby. cael
VOL. I.
42 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
by sympathies and antipathies :- but every sort of mineral can convert
immense masses into its own proper nature, as we convert our ali-
ments into flesh and blood. Mountains are the organs of the respira-
tion of the globe, and the schists the secreting organs; it is by these
that sea-water is decomposed to engender volcanic eruptions ; the veins
in mines are the caries, the abscesses, of the mineral kingdom ; and
the metals a production of putrefaction and disease ; and this accounts
for their bad smell*. ;
Still more recent is a philosophy which substitutes metaphors for
reasoning, setting out with a system of absolute identity, or pantheism,
produces all phenomena or (what it thinks the same thing) all bemgs
by polarization similar to the two electricities ; and calling polarization,
all opposition, every obstacle, whether we consider its situation, nature,
or functions, it seems to oppose God and the world; in the world the
sun and the planets ; in each planet solidity and liquidity; and, pur-
suing this system, changing when needful its figures and allegories,
it reaches at last to the minutest details of organized species.
We must allow that we have selected the most opposite examples,
and that all geologists have not carried the boldness of their concep-
tions as far as those we have cited. But amongst those who have ad-
vanced with more caution, and have not sought arguments beyond
physics or ordinary chemistry, how much diversity of opinion and con-
tradiction have arisen ! :
Opposition of all these Systems.
According to one, all is precipitated successively by crystallization :
all was deposited as it now is ; but the sea which covered all has re-
tired graduallyt.
With another the materials of mountains are incessantly lowered
and carried away by rivers to the depths of the ocean, there to become
heated beneath enormous pressure, and to form layers which the heat
that hardens them will one day elevate with violence§.
A third supposes the liquid divided into a multitude of lakes, am-
phitheatrically one above another, which, after having deposited our
layers of shells, have successively broken down their banks to fill the
basin of the ocean|!.
* M. Patrin has shown much imagination in supporting these fantastic ideas in
many articles in ‘‘ Le Nouveau Dictionnaire d’ Histoire Naturelle.”’
+ We particularly find this application of pantheism to geology in the works of M.
Steffens and M. Oken.
{ M. Delamétherie admits crystallization as a principal cause in his Geology.
§ Hutton and Playfair: Mlustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth. Edin.
1802.
|| Lamanon, in many parts of the Journal de Physique, after Michaelis, and many
otheis. ;
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 33
It is the theory of a fourth, that the tides of seven or eight hundred
fathoms have, on the contrary, carried off from time to time the bot-
toms of the sea, and cast them as mountains and hills in the vallies, or
on the primitive plains of the continent *.
A fifth has thought that meteoric stones have fallen successively
from heaven, which have been the component parts of the earth, and
which bear the imprint of their strange origin in the unknown beings
whose relics they contain.
A sixth makes the earth hollow, and places in the centre a diamond,
which conveys itself by intervention of comets from one pole to an-
otber, drawing with it the centre of gravity and the mass of waters,
and thus alternately drowning the two hemispheres f.
We could quote twenty other systems, equally contradictory with
these. And do not let us be understood as criticising the authors of
them ; on the contrary, we know that these opinions have generally
been elicited from men of genius and. understanding, who were not
ignorant of facts, to examine which many of them had travelled far
and long, and have added many and important truths to the science.
Causes of these Contradictions.
How then can suclr opposing facts occur in the results of those who
have started with the same first principles to resolve the same problem ?
Must it not be that the terms of the problem have not all been tho-
roughly considered ; which has left it to this day undetermined, though
capable of many solutions, all equally plausible when this or that con-
dition is overlooked; all equally unworthy of adoption when a new
conditicn arises, or when attention is arrested by some well-known
but neglected fact.
The Nature and Terms of the Problem.
To quit the language of mathematics, we will say that nearly all the
authors of these systems, having only regarded certain difficulties
which opposed them more forcibly than others, have sclved them in a
"manner more or less plausible, and have thrown aside others as nume-
rous and important. One, for instance, has only contemplated the
difficulty of changing the level of the sea; another, that of dissolving
all terrestrial substances in one and the same liquid; a third, that of
accounting for the existence of animals in the frigid zone, which he
supposed could only live in the torrid zone. Exhausting on these
* Dolomieu, ibid.
+ MM. de Marschall: Recherches sur l’Origine et le Developpement de-VOrdre
actuel du Monde. Giessen, 1802-
} M. Bertrand ; Renouvellement Periodique des Continens Terrestres: Hambourg,
1799.
44 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
points the whole powers of their imagination, they thought they had
effected all in devising a means of answering them. Besides, in ne-
glecting other phenomena, they did not always think of determining
precisely the measure and limits of those which they attempted to,
explain. Fite a
This is particularly true in reference to the secondary formations,
which form the most important and difficult part of the problem. For
a long time naturalists employed themselves very unavailingly in de-
termining the superstrata of their layers, and the relation of these layers
with those sorts of animals and plants whose remains they contain.
Are there animals and plants peculiar to certain layers, and which
are not met with in others? What is the species of those which first
appear, or which come after? Are those two species ever found to-
gether? Are there variations in their return; or in other words, do
the first again recur, and’do the second then disappear? Have
these animals all lived in the places where their remains are found,
or have some of them been conveyed elsewhere? Do they all
exist at present anywhere, or have they been wholly or partly de-
stroyed? Is there a perpetual uniformity between the antiquity of the —
layers and the resemblance or non-resemblance of the fossils with liv-
ing beings? Is there a similarity of climate between fossils and those
of living beings which most resemble them? Can we determine that
the removal of these beings (if there has been any) has been from north
to south or from east to west, or by scattering and mixture; and can
we distinguish the epochs of those removals by the layers which have
these marks impressed on them?
How can we decide on the actual state of the globe if we cannot
answer these questions, if we have not sufficient grounds to enable us
to determine in the affirmative or negative? Besides, it is but too
true that during a long period none of these points have been abso-
lutely cleared up; in fact, it was scarcely deemed expedient to clear
them up previcus to the formation of a system.
Reason why these Preliminaries have been neglected.
It may be assigned as a cause of this peculiar neglect, that geolo-
gists have all been either naturalists of the closet, who had themselves
but very superficially examined the structure of mountains, or mineralo-
gists who had not studied in sufficient detail the innumerable varieties
of animals, and the infinite complication of their different component
parts. The former have only framed systems; the latter have made
admirable observations ; they have in fact laid down the foundations
of the science, but were inadequate to the task of elevating the super-
structure.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 45
Progress of Mineral Geology.
In truth, the mineral portion of the great problem of the theory of.
the earth has been studied with admirable care. by Saussure, and
brought to a wonderful development by Wérner, and by the numerous
and talented disciples of his school.
The former of these celebrated men, scrutinising with jad eee
toil for twenty years the most inaccessible mountainous districts, in a
manner attacking the Alps themselves in every direction, in every de-
file, has laid open tous all the confusion of the primitive formations,
and has clearly traced the secondary formations. The latter, availing
himself of the numerous excavations made in countries containing the
oldest mines, has fixed the laws relating to the succession of layers ;
he has pointed out their relative antiquity, and traced each through its
respective change. It is he, and he only, who has given a date to
geology, as far as regards the mineral nature of the layers; but neither
Saussure nor Wérner have determined the fossilized organized species
in each sort of layer, with that necessary exactness which is so requisite,
from the prodigious number of known animals which they contain.
Other men of science, indeed, studied the fossil relics of organized
bodies ; they collected and published drawings of them by thousands ;
their works will be valuable collections of materials; but, more en-
grossed with animals or plants, considered as such, than with the
theory of the earth, or, regarding these petrifactions or fossils.as. curio-
sities rather than historical documents, or, in truth, contenting them-
selves with partial explanations on the relative bearing of each relic,
they have almost always neglected to seek for the general laws of posi-
tion, or the relation of fossils with the layers.
i
Importance of Fossils in Geology.
And yet the idea of such a research was very natural. How was it
overlooked that it is to fossils alone that must be attributed the birth
of the theory of the earth; that, without them we-could never have
surmised that there were successive epochs in the formation of the
globe, and a series of different operations? Indeed, they alone prove
that the globe has not always had the same crust, by the certainty of
the fact that they must have existed at the surface before they were
buried in the depths where they are now found. It is only by analogy
that we extend to primitive formations that conclusion which fossils.
enable us definitively to ascribe to secondary formations ; and if there
were only formations without fossils, no one could prove that these
formations were not simultaneously produced.
Again, it is to fossils, small as has been our acquainere with
46 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
them, that we owe the little knowledge we have attained respecting
the nature of the revolutions of the globe. They have taught us, that
the layers which comprise them have been undisturbedly deposited in
a liquid; that their alterations have corresponded with those of the
liquid; that their exposure was occasioned by thé removal of this
liquid ; that these exposures have taken place more than once. None
of these facts could have been decided on without these fossils.
The study of the mineral portion of geology, which is not less ne-
cessary, which is even of still greater utility with regard to the me-
chanical arts, is yet much less instructive with relation to the object of
which we are treating.
We are in positive ignorance regarding the causes which can have
produced the changes of the substances composing the layers; we do
not even know the agents which could have held certain of them in
solution ; and it is yet a matter of controversy, whether certain of them
owe their origin to water or fire. To come at once to the point, we
observe that there is a general agreement on one point only ; namely,
that the sea has changed its situation. And how should we know that
if we had no fossils ? .
Fossils, which have given birth to the theory of the earth, have also
furnished it with its principal lights, the only ones which have been
generally recognized down to the present period.
It is this idea which has encouraged us to take up the subject; but
the field is immense; a single person could only glance over but a
very trifling part. A choice was to be made therefore, and we did not
hesitate. The class of fossils which forms the object of this work at
once determined us, because we saw that it is at the same time more
pregnant with precise results, and yet less known and more rich in
novel matters of research *.
Paramount importance of the Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds.
It is apparent, that the bones of quadrupeds conduct us, by various
reasonings, to more precise results than any other relics of organized
bodies.
In the first place, they characterize more clearly the revolutions
which have effected them. Shells prove that the sea was once where
they are now found; but their change of species could only at the ut-
most proceed from slight variations in the nature of the liquid or —
merely in its temperature.
* My work has in fact proved the situation of this subject when TI took it up, in
spite of the admirable labours of Camper, Pallas, Blumenbach, Merk, Semmering,
Rusen, Miiller, Fischer, Faujas, Home, and other learned men, whose works E have
quoted with much care in those chaptcrs of my books to which they relate.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 47
They might have had relation to causes still more accidental.
There is nothing to assure us that at the bottom of the sea certain spe-
cies, even certain genera, after having occupied for a longer or shorter
period determinate situations, have not been forced away by others.
Here, on the contrary, all is precise; the appearance of the bones of
quadrupeds, particularly the whole carcases in the layers, betokens
either that the layer itself which contains them was formerly dry land,
or that there was terra firma in its immediate vicinity. Their disap-
pearance renders it certain that this layer was inundated, or that this
dry land ceased to exist. It is then by these that we learn in a posi-
tive manner the important fact of the repeated irruptions of the sea,
with which shells and other marine productions could not have made
us acquainted ; it is by studying them profoundly that we may hope
to ascertain the numbers and periods of these irruptions.
Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the sur-
face of the globe must have exercised a more entire action over terres-
trial quadrupeds than marine animals. As these revolutions have in a
great measure consisted in changes of the bed of the sea, and the
waters must have destroyed all the quadrupeds which they reached, if
the irruption were general, the whole class must have perished ; or, if
only operating on certain continents, it must have destroyed at least
the species peculiar to these continents, without exercising the same
influence upon marine animals. On the contrary, millions of aquatic
individuals might have been left on dry land, or buried under new
layers, or thrown with violence on the shore, and their race be still
preserved in some places more tranquil, where it might again be pro-
pagated after the disturbance of the waters had ceased.
Thirdly, this action, as more complete, is more easily seized on; it
is more easy to demonstrate its effects, because, the number of quad-
rupeds being limited, the greater part of their species, at least of the
larger kind, being known, we have still further means afforded us of
ascertaining whether the fossil bones belong to one of them, or if they
formed a part of the species now extinct. As we are, on the contrary,
very far from knowing all the marine testacea and sea fish ; (and are pro-
bably ignorant yet of the greater part which are in the depths of the
ocean), it is impossible to know with certainty if a species found fos-
silized be or be not extinct. Thus we observe learmed men obsti-
nately bent on giving the name of pelagian shells, that is, shells of the
deep sea, to belemnites, to cornua-ammonis, and other shelly relics,
which have as yet only been observed in ancient layers ; meaning by
that, that if they have not been yet found in a living state, it is be-
cause they inhabit depths beyond the reach of our nets.
48 _ ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
Certainly naturalists have not yet traversed every continent, and do
not even’ know all the quadrupeds which inhabit the countries over
which they have travelled. New species of this class are from time to
time discovered ; and those who have not attentively examined all the
circumstances of these discoveries, might believe also that the unknown
quadrupeds whose bones are found in our layers have remained con-
cealed to the present time in some islands not yet discovered, or in
some of the vast deserts which occupy the middle of Asia, Africa, the
two Americas, and New Holland.
Little probability of finding new Species of great Quadrupeds.
However, if we examine what species of quadrupeds have been re-
cently found, and in what circumstances they have been discovered,
we shall see that there is but little hope of ever finding those that we
have only seen as fossils.
Islands of moderate extent, situated at a distance from extensive
continents have very few quadrupeds, and those very small; when
they have large ones, it is because they have been brought from else-
where. Bougainville and Cook found only dogs in the South Sea
Islands; and the largest species of the West-India Islands was the
agouti. ;
In fact, large territories such as Asia, Africa, the two Americas, and
New Holland, have large quadrupeds, and generally species peculiar
to each of them; so that wherever it has been found that the situa-
tion of these lands has kept them isolated from the rest of the world,
a class of quadrupeds has been there found entirely different from any
elsewhere existing. Thus, when the Spaniards first overran South
America, they did not find one of the quadrupeds common to Europe,
Asia, or Africa. The puma, the jaguar, the tapir, the cabiai, the lama,
the vicuna, sloths, armadilloes, opossums, and all the species of mon-
keys, were to them entirely strange, and beings of which they had no
idea. The same phenomenon occurred in our time, when the first
survey of the coast of New Holland and the adjacent islands took
place. The different kangaroos, phascolomys, dasyurus, and perameles,
the flying phalangers, the ornithorynchi, and echidnz, have been found
to astonish naturalists by their strange conformations, which broke
through all rules and overthrew all systems.
If then there remained any extensive continent to discover, we
might hope to find new species, amongst which, some might be found
more or less resembling those of which the bowels of the earth have
presented us with the relics; but it is sufficient to cast a glance over
the mass of the world, and see the numerous directions in which navi-
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 49
gators have ploughed the ocean, to judge that there cannot be any
other large tract of land, unless it be at the North Pole, where the ice
would not admit of any duration of existence.
Thus we find that it is from the interior of the large divisions of the
world that we can expect unknown quadrupeds.
But, on a little reflection, we shall soon see that this expectation is
hardly more likely to be realized here than in the islands.
The European traveller does not easily effect his passage through
vast extent of countries, desert, or only supporting a ferocious popula-
tion, and this is more particularly the case in Africa; but nothing pre-.
vents animals from overrunning these countries in every direction and
approaching the coasts. Although great mountainous chains may in-
tervene between the coasts and the deserts of the interior, they would
be broken in some places to allow of the passage of the rivers; and, in
these burning deserts, quadrupeds give the preference to the banks of
the rivers. The population of these coasts ascend these rivers and
soon acquire a knowledge, either from experience, or by commerce
and tradition, of the more remote population, and of all the remarka-
ble species which live near the sources of the streams.
At no period have the civilized nations, who have frequented the
coasts of a great country, failed in acquiring a knowledge of the largest
animals, or those whose formation is peculiar and striking.
Facts bear out this reasoning. Although the ancients did not pass
the Imaus or the Ganges, in Asia, and had not got beyond Mount Atlas,
in Africa, they yet knew all the large animals of these parts of the
world. and, if they did not distinguish all these species, it was not be-
cause they could not have seen or heard speak of them, but because
the resemblance of the species would not allow of their discriminating
their peculiar characteristics. The only great exception which may be
brought against me is the tapir of Malacca, recently sent from India by
two young naturalists, pupils of mine, MM. Duvaucel and Diard, and
which in fact is one of the most brilliant discoveries with which mo-
dern times have enriched natural history.
The ancients were acquainted with the elephant, and the history of
this quadruped is more exact in Aristotle than in Buffon.
They were not even ignorant of the distinguishing marks between
the elephants of Africa and those of Asia* (a).
* See in my Researches the chapter on elephants.
(a) ($} In the Zoological Magazine, January 1st, 1833, p.20, there is a full de-
scription, with a very fair plate, of the one-horned species of India, the Rhinoce:os
Indicus of Cuvier. From this magazine, which, we lament, was not sufficiently sup-
ported to be upheld for a longer period than six months, we extract the following
account :— i
VOL. I. H
50 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
They knew the double-horned rhinoceros, now no longer living in
modern Europe. Domitian exhibited one at Rome, and had it en-
eraved on medals. Pausanias describes it with much exactness.
As the Rhinoceros Indicus is the only species of one-horned animals which has
in modern times been brought alive to Europe, it has been most commonly figured.
A sketch was taken from the animal sent to Portugal in 1513, which was engraved
by Albert Durer. This sketch was afterwards embellished by the celebrated painter
of Nuremberg, and at a still later period was put into the possession of Sir Hans
Sloane with an inscription attached to it, of which the following appears in the Phi-
losophical Transactions for 1744, a literal translation: ‘‘In 1513, May 1, there
was brought to our king at Lisbon such a living beast from the East Indies that is
ealled Rhinocerate ; therefore, on account of its wonderfulness, I thought myself ob-
liged to send you a representation of it. It hath the colour of a toad, and is close
covered over with thick scales. It is in size like an elephant, but lower, and is
the elephant’s deadly enemy; it hath on the fort-part of its nose a strong sharp
horn; and when this beast comes near the elephant to fight with him, he always
first whets his horn upon the stones, and runs at the elephant with his head between
his fore-legs ; then rips up the elephant where he hath the thinnest skin, and so
gores him. The elephant is terribly afraid of the Rhinocerate, for he gores al-
ways wherever he meets an elephant, for he is well armed, and is very alert and nim-
ble. This beast is called Rhinocero in Greek and Latin, but in India Gomba.’’
The animal sent to England in 1739 is described by Dr. Parsons as very broad
and thick. His headis very large, and the hinder parts next his ears considerably
too high for the rest of his face, which is flat, and sinks down suddenly ferward to-
wards the middle, rising again to the horn, but ina less degree. The horn stands
on the nose of the animal as on a hill. In Sir Hans Sloane’s museum, the bones
of the head of one of these animals clearly show that the part on which the horn is
fixed rises to a blunt cone, to answer to the cavity in the basis of the horn, which is
hard and solid, having no marrow or core like other quadrupeds. From the fore-
part of the horn to the upper lip is the nose; on this part there are a number of
wrinkles running across the front of it, and advancing towards the eyes. The nos-
trils are in the same direction as the mouth, and not above an inch from it. The
under lip resembles that of an ox, and the upper that of a horse, with this difference,
the rhinoceros can stretch it cut about six inches to a point, and double it round a
stick ; so that in its action it is more like the proboscis of the elephant.
According to some naturalists, the tongue is said to be rough enough to rub a man’s
flesh from his bones; but that of our present animal is soft, whether it may grow
rough as the beast grows older must yet remain undetermined.
His eyes are dull and half closed, like those of a hog, and situated near the nose.
His ears broad and thin, with a round root, with wrinkles about it. His neck is
short, and has two folds round it, the fore one being broken underneath, whence is
suspended a hollow flap deep enough to contain a man’s fist. His shoulders are
thick and heavy, and each has a fold downward that crosses the fore-leg, and doubles
under the belly behind the fore-leg.
His body is very thick, and juts out at the sides like that of a cow with calf.
His belly sinks almost to the ground. From the highest point in his back, the
fold of the loins runs down on each side between the last ribs and the hips, and is
lost before it comes to the belly ; but above the place of its being lost another Tises
and runs backward round the hind legs, a little above the joint. This is called the
crural fold.
The legs of the rhinoceros are thick and strong; they bend back at the knee,
Round the joint of each leg there is a fold, which is only perceptible when the ani-
mal lies down.
The tail is not more than seventeen or eighteen inches long, and not very thick. It
has a great roughness round it, and a twist or stricture towards the extremity, whichis
flat. On the sides of this flat extremity of the tail are a few long black hairs. On the left
side of the tail; the hairs grow almost up to its root, whereas on the right side they
grow no higher than the flat part. There is no other hair on this animal than a very
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. ol
The unicorn rhinoceros, though very remote from Rome, was equally
well known there. Pompey exhibited one. Strabo has accurately
described another at Alexandria*.
The rhinoceros of Sumatra, described by Mr. Bell, and that ‘of Java,
discovered and sent over by Messrs. Duvaucel and Diard, do not appear
to live on the continent. Therefore it is not astonishing that the ancients
had no knowledge of them, and ten if they had they would not have
distinguished them.
The hippopotamus has not a so well described as the preceding
species; but we find very exact delineations of it on the monuments
left by the Romans, which represent things relative to Egypt, such as
the statue of Nilus, the mosaic of Palestrina, and a great many medals.
In fact, the Romans saw them often, they were exhibited by Scaurus,
Augustus, Antoninus, Commodus, Heliogabalus, Philip, and Carinust.
The two species of camels, that of Bactria, and that of Arabia, are
small quantity on the posterior edge of the upper parts of the ears. This animal
has a wonderful acuteness in its hearing ; the slightest noise disturbs him, whether
eating or sleeping; and, under the greatest engagements nature imposes upon him,
he stops every thing suddenly, and lifts up his head with great attention till the
noise is over.
The skin of the rhinoceros is thick and impenetrable. In several parts of the
body it is covered over with hard incrustations, particularly on the shoulders and
buttocks. Between the folds the skin is soft and smooth, and of a pale flesh colour.
The folds of this quadruped are necessary to render the body flexible. The skin
is so inflexible and impenetrable in most parts, that without folds they could not
bend. But by the wisdom of Providence, these folds are placed in such parts of the
bedy as to facilitate the performance of any voluntary motion the animal may be dis-
posed to make.
The rhinoceros utters a note similar to the grunt of a boar, but somewhat shriller
when it is enraged. One hundred and twenty-four pounds of food, and a propor-
tionate quantity of drink, is consumed by this animal in a day. The animal of
which Dr. Parsons speaks consumed every day three pounds of sugar and seven
pounds of rice, with about a truss of hay per week, besides greens of different kinds.
From the time of his being taken to the time of his landing in England, his ex-
penses were said to amount to one thousand pounds. The rhinoceros commonly
lives in solitude, moves slowly, ploughing the earth with his horn, and casting huge
stones behind him. When he runs, his tail is extended like that of a bull. The
rhinoceros is greatly tormented by the stings of numerous insects, and, as a means
of defence, they roll themselves in the mire, which hardening in the sun, forms a
sort of cuirass to the naked skin. The flesh of the rhinoceros is similar in its flavour
to pork, and better than that of the elephant. ‘The horn is much esteemed by the
Asiatices, they make drinking cups of them; they are sometimes sculptured with con-
siderable taste. The hide is employed to make whips. An interesting memoir, by
M. Frederick Cuvier, has appeared in the splendid work published by him conjointly
with M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, on the animals in the menagerie in the Garden of
Plants at Paris. It relates to the rhinoceros lately living in that establishment.
It was from this memoir that the figure of the rhinoceros was taken. We are
happy to add, that for those geologists who directed their attention to fossil animals,
that there is at present a very interesting specimen of this genus of large animals in
the Surrey Zoological Gardens.—ENe. Ep.
* See in my work the chapter on the rhinoceros.
+ See in my Researches the chapter on the hippopotamus.
H 2
52 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
already well described and characterized by Aristotle*. The ancients
knew the giraffe or camel-leopard ; they even had a living one at Rome
in the circus under the dictatorship. of Julius Cesar, in the year of
Rome 708. Gordian III. had ten at one time, which were killed at
the secular games of Philipt, which must astonish the moderns, who
have only seen one in the fifteenth century f.
If we read attentively the descriptions of the hippopotamus, given
by Herodotus and Aristotle, and which are said to be borrowed from
Hecatzeus of Miletus, we shall find that they must have been composed
of two different animals, of which one perhaps was the real hippopo-
tamus, and the other certainly the gnu, a quadruped of which our na-
turalists have made no mention till the end of the eighteenth century.
It was the same animal of which so many fabled narratives were told
under the name of catoblepas or catablepon§.
The Ethiopian wild boar of Agatharchides, which had horns, was the
same as our Ethiopian wild boar, whose enormous weapons of defence
have almost as much claim to the name of horns as the tusks of the
elephant ||.
The bubalus and nagor are described by Pliny{ ; the gazelle, by
fElian** ; the oryx, by Oppian}t+; the axis was known in the time of ©
Ctesias {t; the algazel and the corinna are perfectly depicted on Egyp-
tian monuments §§. ;
- Aflian well describes the yak or bos grunniens, under the name of
the ox, whose tail serves for a fly-flapper'||||.
The buffalo has not been domesticated amongst the ancients; but
the ox of the Indies, of which lian 44 speaks, and which had horns
large enough to hold three amphore, was a variety of the buffalo,
called arnt.
And even this wild ox, with depressed horns, which Aristotle places
in Arachosia***, must be the common buffalo.
The ancients knew the oxen without hornst+}+; the oxen of Africa,
* His. Anim. lib. ii, c. 1.
T Jul. Capitol. Gord. IIT, cap. 23.
{ That which the soldan of Egypt sent to Lorenzo de Medicis, and which is painted
in the frescoes of Poggio Cajano.
§ See Pliny, lib. viii, cap. 32, and Elian, lib. vii. ¢. 5.
|| 4Elian, Anim. y. 27.
4] Pliny, lib. viii, cap. 15, and lib. xi, c. 37.
** lian, Anim. 1. xiv. c. 14.
tt Op. Cyneg. ii, v. 445, et seq.
$f Pliny, lib. viii, c. 21.
§§ See the great work on Egypt, Antiq. iv, pl. 49 and 66.
\|\| 4flian, Anim. xv, 14.
Qq Id. iii, 34.
*** Arist. Hist. An. lib. ii, cap. 5. +rr Aflian, ii, 53.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 53
whose horns, attached to the skin only, are shaken with it*; the oxen
of India as swift in flight as horses}; those no larger than a goat} ;
sheep with a large tail§; and those of India as large as asses |.
Although the ancient accounts of the aurochs, the rein-deer and the
elk, are mixed with fable, they still prove that they had some know-
ledge of them; but that the knowledge, founded on the accounts of
ignorant persons, had not been submitted to a critical judgment].
These animals dwell in the country assigned to them by the ancients,
and have only disappeared in countries too much cultivated for their
habits of life; the aurochs and the elks still live in the forests of
Lithuania, which formerly joined the forest of Hercynia. There are
aurochs in the north of Greece, as in the time of Pausanias. The rein-
deer inhabits the north, in the cold regions which it has always in-
habited; there it changes colour, not according to its will, but to the
seasons. It was by a series of inexcuseable mistakes that it was
thought they would be found in the Pyrenees in the fourteenth cen-
tury **. The white bear was seen in Egypt during the reign of the
Ptolemies ff.
Lions and panthers were common at Rome in the games; they were
exhibited by hundreds; there were even tigers; the striped hyena,
and the crocodile of the Nile, were there produced. There are in the
artificial mosaics preserved at Rome excellent representations of the
rarest of these species; amongst others, the striped hyena accurately
depicted on a fragment preserved in the museum in the Vatican ; and
when I was in Rome (in 1809) they discovered in a garden beside the
arch of Gallienus, a mosaic pavement of natural stones arranged in
the Florentine manner, representing four Bengal tigers, admirably
done.
The museum of the Vatican contains a basalt crocodile, very ntl
accurate{t{; we cannot doubt but that the hippotigris was the zebra,
which, however, is only found in the southern parts of Africa§§.
+ élian, ii, 20. + Id. xv, 24. + Id. ibid.
§ Id. Anim. iii. 5. || Id. iv. 32.
§| See in my Researches the chapters on deer and oxen.
** Buffon having read in Du Fouilloux a passage quoted from Gaston-Phebus,
Count de Foix, in which that prince describes the rein-deer hunt, imagined that that
animal existed in the Pyrenees at that period; and the printed editions of Gaston
are so faulty, that it was with difficulty ascertained what the author means to say ;
but having reverted to the original manuscript, which is preserved in the king’s
library, I have found that it was in Xueden and Nourwergue (Sweden and Norway),
that he says he saw and partook of the chase of rein-deer.
ut Athenée, lib. v.
t There is no error except that there is a nail too many at the back of the foot.
eee exhibited thirty-six. Dion. lib. xv.
§§ Caracalla killed one in the circus. Dion. lib. Ixxvii. Cinf. Gisb. Cuperi de
Elipt. in nummis obyiis, ex. ii. cap. 7.
54 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
It would be easy to show that nearly all the most remarkable species
of apes have been accurately defined by the ancients under the names
of pitheci, sphynxes, satyrs, cebi, eynocephali, cercopitheci*.
They knew and described even the smaller descriptions of glires,
when they had any peculiarity of conformation or remarkable pro-
pertyt. But the smaller species do not concern us; it is enough to
have shown that all the larger kinds, distinguished by some marked
characteristic, which we have now any knowledge of in Europe, Asia,
and Africa, were already known to the ancients; whence we may
safely draw the conclusion, that if they do not describe the smaller,
or if they do not discriminate between those which closely resembled
each other, as the gazelles and others, they were prevented by care-
lessness or want of method, rather than by opposition from the cli-
mate. We shall also determine, that if eighteen or twenty ages, and
the circumnavigation of Africa and the Indies, have added nothing in
this species to what the ancients already knew, that there is no likeli-
hood that ages to come will bring much additional information to our —
posterity.
But perhaps an inverse argument may be used against us, and it
will be said, that not only the ancients, as we have just proved, have -
known as many animals as ourselves, but they have described many
which we now have not; that we are too hasty in regarding these
animals as fabulous ; that we should again search for them before we
decide in exhausting the history of the existing creation ; that indeed,
amongst these pretendedly fabulous animals, we shall detect, when
we know them better, the originals of our remains of unknown species.
Some may even surmise that those different monsters, the essential
ornaments of the heroic age amongst nearly all people, are precisely
those which it has been necessary to destroy, to admit of the progress
and establishment of civilization. Thus Theseus and Bellerophon,
who bravely defeated these noxious animals, must have been far more
fortunate than the existing race, but have not yet contrived to exter-
minate any one species, but only to drive them back.
It is easy to reply to this objection, by examining the descriptions
of these unknown beings, and searching into their origin.
The most numerous have a source purely mythological, and of that
their descriptions bear the undeniable impress ; for we see in nearly
all only portions of known animals, united by an unrestrained fancy,
* See Lichtenstein, Comment. de Simiarium quotquot veteribus innotuerint formis.
Hamburg, 1791.
tT The jerboa is engraved on the medals of Cyrene, and pointed out by Aristotle as
the rat with two feet.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 55
and in opposition to every law of nature. Those invented or put to-
gether by the Greeks are certainly graceful in their composition ; like
those arabesques which ornament the remains of some ancient edifices,
and which the fertile pencil of Raphael has multiplied : forms are there
united, totally repugnant to reason, offering to the eye agreeable pro-
portions; these are the light productions of happy dreams ; perhaps
emblems of the oriental taste, in which they pretended to veil beneath
mystic imagery the refined suggestions of metaphysics and morals.
Let us excuse those who etidenvout to employ their time in unravel-
ling the wisdom concealed in the Sphynx of Thebes, the Pegasus
of Thessaly, the Minotaur of Crete, or the Chimera of Epirus; but let
us hope that no one would seriously seek for them in nature; as well
might we expect to find the animals of Daniel, or the beasts of the
Apocalypse. Let us not attempt to seek for the mythological animals
of the Persians, offspring of a still more heated imagination ; the mar-
tichore, or destroyer of men, which has the head of a man on the body
of a lion, terminated by a scorpion’s tail*; the griffin, or treasure-
keeper, half eagle half lion}; the cartazonont, or wild ass, whose head
is armed with a long horn.
-Ctesias, who has described these as existing animals, has passed
with many for an inventor of fables, whilst he only attributed a reality
to emblematical figures. These fantastic sculptures have been found
in the ruins of Persepolis§. What is their meaning? Most proba-
bly we shall never learn, but they certainly do not represent real crea-
tures.
Agatharchides, another fabricator of animals, probably drew from
an analogous source. The monuments of Egypt show us still nume-
rous combinations of the parts of different species; the gods are there
often represented with a human body and an animal’s head; we see
animals with human heads, which have produced the cynocephali, the
sphynxes, and the satyrs of ancient naturalists. The custom of de-
picting in the same painting men of different heights, the king or the
conqueror gigantic, the conquered or people three or four times smaller,
may have given birth to the story of the pigmies. It is in some re-
cess of one of these monuments that Agatharchides must have seen
his carnivorous bull, whose mouth, cleft to his ears, spared no other
* Plin. viii, 31; Arist. lib. ii, cap. 11; Phot. Bibl. art. 72; Ctes. Indic; lian,
Anim. iv, 21.
+ Aflian, Anim. iv, 27.
+ Id. xvi. 20; Photius Bibl. art. 72°; Ctes. Indic. “
§ See Cactille Lebrun, Voyage en Muscovy, en Perse, et aux Indes, t. ii; and
the German work of M. Heeren on the Commerce of the Ancients.
56 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
animal*; but surely naturalists will not assert that there can be
such ; for nature never unites either cloven feet or horns with cutting
teeth.
There were most probably other figures equally strange, either in
those monuments which were not able to withstand the ravages of
time, or in those temples of Ethiopia and Arabia which the Mahome-
dans and Abyssinians, in the excess of their religious zeal, have de-
stroyed. Those of India swarm with them ; but the combinations are
too extravagant to deceive any one: monsters with a hundred arms,
and twenty different heads, are too monstrous to find belief.
It is not the Japanese and Chinese only who have not the imagi-
nary animals which they represent as real, and even exhibit in their
religious books; the Mexicans have them also : it is the custom of all
people, either at the time when their idolatry has not become suffi-
ciently refined, or when the meaning of these emblematical combina-
tions have been lost. But who will pretend to find in nature these
offsprings of ignorance and superstition ?
Certain travellers, however, anxious to establish a charaeter of re-
nown, haye asserted that they have seen these fantastic animals, or
that, for want of due attention, and deceived by a slight resemblance,
they have taken real creatures for them. Large apes have appeared
real cynocephali: baboons, as men with tails; and thus St. Augustin
said that he had seen a satyr.
Some real animals, scarcely seen and badly described, may haye
caused these monstrous ideas, slightly founded on reality. Thus we
cannot doubt the existence of the hyena, though this animal has not.
a neck supported by one single bone}, and that he does not change
sex every year, as Pliny} says; thus perhaps the carnivorous bull is
only a rhinoceros with his two horns. M. de Weltheim asserts, that
the auriferous ants of Herodotus are corsacs.
One of the most famous amongst the animals of the ancients is the
unicorn. Naturalists were fully bent, even down to our times, on
~
* Photius Bibl. art. 250; Agatharchid. Excerpt. Hist. cap. xxxix; A#lian, xvii,
35; Plin. viii, 21.
+ I have seen, in the cabinet of the late M. Adrian Camper, a byena’s skeleton, -
in which many of the vertebre of the neck were soldered together. It is probable
that it is some similar individual which has caused this character to be given to all
hyenas. ‘This animal must be more subject to this accident than any other, in con-
sequence of the prodigious force of its neck, and the frequent use it makes of it.
When the hyena has seized any thing, it is easier to draw it along than to tear from
it what it holds: this is why the Arabs have selected it as the emblem of insuperable
obstinacy.
} It does not change the sex ; but has at the perineum an orifice which has given
tise to the opinion of its being an hermaphrodite.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. SY
finding it, or at least in seeking arguments in favour of its existence.
Three animals are frequently mentioned by the ancients as having
only one horn in front. The oryx of Africa, which has at the same
time cloven feet, the hair reversed *, is of great size, equal to the oxt,
or even the rhinoceros}, and which it is agreed approaches sheep or
goats in form§; the ass of the Indies, which is solid footed; and the
‘monoceros, properly so called, whose feet are sometimes compared
with those of a lion||, sometimes with those of an elephant, and con-
sequently cloven-footed. The horse** and the unicorn oxen have a
mutual relation certainly to the ass of the Indiestf, for the ox is men-
tioned as even solid-footed. I ask, if these animals existed as distinct
species, should we not at least have their horns in our collections?
And what single horns have we but those of the rhinoceros and the
narwal ?
How, after this, can we refer to the coarse figures traced by savages
on the rocks}? Ignorant of perspective, and wishing to present in
profile the horned antelope, they could only give it one horn, and thus
originated the oryx. The oryx of the Egyptian monuments are most
probably but the productions of a similarly crude style, which the re-
ligion of the country imposed on the artist. Many of the profiles of
quadrupeds have only one leg before and one behind; why then
should they saow two horns? It is possible that individual animals
might be taken in the chase, whom accident had despoiled of one
horn, as it often happens to chamois and the Scythian antelope
(saiga) ; and that would suffice to confirm the error which these pic-
tures originally produced. It is thus, probably, that we find anew the
unicorn in the mountains of Thibet.
_ All the ancients, besides, have not reduced the oryx to a single
horn; Oppian§§ expressly gives it several ; and A‘lian mentions some
of the oryx who had four||||. Now if this animal were ruminating
and cleft-footed, it certainly had the frontal bone divided in two, and
could not, according to the accurate remark of Camper, have had a
horn on the suture.
* Arist. Anim. ii, 1.iii, 1; Plin. xl, 46.
+ Herod. iv, 192.
+ Oppian Cyneg. ii, vers. 551.
§ Plin. viii, 53.
|| Philostorge, ili, 11.
q Plin. viii, 21.
** Onesicrite, ap. Strab. lib. xv ; Alian,-Anim., xiii, 42.
Tr Plin. viii, 31.
{tt Barrow, Voyage to the Cape.
§§ Oppian Cyneg. lib. ii, v, 468 and 471.
\{\| De An. lib. xv, cap. 14.
58 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
But, we may be asked, what two-horned animal could give the idea
of the oryx, and present the features which are given of its conforma-
tion, even in depriving it of its unity of horn? I reply with Pallas, it
is the horned antelope, improperly called the pasan by Buffon. It in-
habits the deserts of Africa, and would have reached the confines of
Egypt; it is that which the hieroglyphics seem to represent; its
figure is nearly that of the stag ; its height equals that of the ox; the
hair of its back is directed towards the head; its horns are formidable
weapons, sharp as darts, hard as iron; its hair is whitish, its counte-
nance has marks and black streaks ; and this is all that naturalists
have described of it; and, as to the motives of the priests of Egypt,
who spread abroad fables concerning it, and adopted it in their hiero-
glyphics, there is no occasion for their having a foundation in reality.
Suppose then that an oryx with only one horn has been seen; that
they have taken it for a perfect being, a type of its whole species ;
suppose that Aristotle, who adopted this error, has been copied by
others ; it is all possible, and even natural, but proves nothing in fa-
vour of the existence of an unicorn species.
As to the ass of the Indies, we have only to read of the anti-poison-—
ous properties attributed to its horn by the ancients, and we shall see
that they are precisely similar to those which the orientals of the pre-
sent day assign to the horn of the rhinoceros. When the horn was
first introduced amongst the Greeks, they could not have known the
animal which had borne it. Indeed, Aristotle makes no mention of
the rhinoceros, and Agatharchides is the first who has described it.
In the same manner, the ancients possessed ivory long before they be-
came acquainted with the elephant. Perhaps some traveller may
have named the rhinoceros the ass of the Indies, with as much justice
as the Romans had named the elephant the bull of Lucania. All that
has been said of the strength, height, and ferocity of the wild ass,
agrees very well with the rhinoceros. Moreover, those who best
know the rhinoceros, finding in former authors the denomination of
ass of the Indies, have taken it, without reflexion, for that of a peculiar
animal; and, in fact, from the name, we should conclude that this
animal was solid-footed. There is a full description of an ass of the
Indies by Ctesias*, but we have seen above that it was taken from
the bas-reliefs of Persepolis; it should not pass for anything in the
actual history of the animal.
When there was also a description still less exact, which men-
tioned an animal with a single horn with many lines, a third species
was made out, with the name of monoceros. These sort of twofold
* Adlian, Anim. iv. 52; Photius, Bibl. p. 154.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 59
accounts are the more common with ancient naturalists, because al-
most all those whose works remain to us were simple compilers ; but
even Aristotle himself has frequently mixed facts borrowed from others
with those which he himself has observed; so that in fact the art of
criticism was as little known then by naturalists as by historians, which
is saying a great deal. :
After all these reasonings, all these digressions, it results, that all
the great animals that are known in the old continent were known to
the ancients; and that the animals described by the ancients, and not
now known, were fabulous ; it also results, that very little time elap-
sed before all the great animals of the three first known parts of the
globe were known by the people who frequented the coasts.
We may thence conclude, that we have not even any large species
to discover in America. If there were any, there exists no cause why
we should not have been acquainted with them; and in fact, for a
hundred and fifty years, none have been discovered. The tapir, the
jaguar, the puma, the cabiai, the lama, the vigogne, the red wolf, the
buffalo, or American bison, the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadilloes, are
already in Margrave and in Hernandes, as well as Buffon. We may
say that they are there better described, for Buffon has mingled the
history of the ant-eaters, misunderstood the jaguar and the red wolf,
and confounded the bison of America with the aurochs of Poland. In
fact, Pennant is the first naturalist who has properly distinguished the
little musk ox, but it had long been pointed out by travellers. The
cleft-footed horse of Molina is not described by the first Spanish voy-
agers ; but its existence is more than doubtful, and Molina’s authority
is too dubious to be adopted. It would be possible to characterise
better than at present the stags of America and the Indies; but with
them, as with the ancients respecting the various antelopes, a good
method of description was wanting, (and not opportunities of seeing
them,) that they might be better known. We may then say, that the
moufion of the Blue Mountains is now the only quadruped of America
of any size, the discovery of which is entirely modern ; and perhaps it
is only a Siberian goat that has crossed the ice.
How then can we believe that the enormous mastodons, the gigan-
tic megatheria, whose remains have been found under the earth in the
two Americas, can still exist on that continent? How could they
have escaped those wandering people who incessantly over-run the
country, in every corner of it, and who themselves acknowledge that
they no longer exist, since they have imagined a fable about their de-
struction, saying that they were killed by the Great Spirit, to prevent
them from destroying the human race? But we may see that this
60 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
fable was occasioned by the discovery of the bones, like that of the
inhabitants of Siberia and their mammoth, which they pretend lives
under ground like moles; and lke all those of the ancients about the
tombs of the giants, which they placed wherever they found the bones
of elephants.
Thus we may believe, that if, as we shall prove hereafter, any of the
great species of quadrupeds now embedded in regularly stony layers,
are not found similar to the living species that we are acquainted
with,—it is not the effect of chance, nor because these species, of which
we have only fossil bones, are hidden in deserts, and have escaped all
travellers to the present time; we ought, on the contrary, to regard
this phenomenon as tending to general causes; and the study of
it as one of the most proper to lead us to the origin and nature of
these causes.
The Fossil Bones of Quadrupeds are difficult to determine.
But if this study is more satisfactory in its results than that of the
fossil remains of other animals, it is also beset with infinitely greater
difficulties. The fossil shells generally present themselves entire, and
with all the characteristics which admit of their being analogously
arranged in collections or works of naturalists; fish even present their
skeletons more or less entire ; we generally trace the original form of
their bodies, and frequently their generic and specific characteristics,
which are drawn from their solid parts. In quadrupeds, on the con-
trary, although we should meet with the whole skeleton, we should
have great difficulty in applying to it the characteristics for the most
part derived from the hair, colour, and other marks, which disappear
before the incrustation ; and it is uncommonly rare to find a fossil
skeleton at all perfect; bones isolated and confusedly intermingled,
most frequently broken and reduced to fragments ; this is all with which
our layers furnish us in this class, and is the sole resource of the natu-
ralist. Thus we may say that the majority of observers, frightened at
these difficulties, have passed lightly over the fossil bones of quadrupeds ;
have classed them very vaguely, after superficial resemblances: or
have not even hazarded the giving a name to them; so that this part
of the fossil history, the most important and instructive of all, is of all
others the least cultivated *. ;
* T do not pretend by this remark, as well as those already made, to detract from
the merit of the observations of Messrs. Camper, Pallas, Blumenbach, Scemmering,
Merk, Faugas, Rosen Miiller, Home, &c.; but their estimable labours, which have
been very useful to me, and which I have cited everywhere, are only partial, and many
of these labours even published after the first editions of this Discourse.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 61
Principle of this determination.
Fortunately, comparative anatomy possesses a principle which, pro-
perly developed, was capable of clearing up all embarrassment : it was
that of the natural relation of forms in organized beings, by means of
which each sort of creature may, by rigorous scrutiny, be known by
each fragmant of each of its parts.
Every organized being forms a whole, an unique, and perfect system,
the parts of which mutually correspond, and concur in the same definitive
action by a reciprocal re-action. None of these parts can change with-
out the whole changing ; and consequently each of them, separately
considered, points out and marks all the others. ;
Thus, as I have before remarked, if the intestines of an animal are
so organized as only to digest flesh, and that fresh, it follows that its
jaws must be constructed to devour a prey, its claws to seize and tear
it, its teeth to cut and divide it, the whole structure of its organs of
motion such as to pursue and catch it, its perceptive organs to discern it
at a distance ; nature must even have placed in its brain the necessary
instinct, to know how to conceal itself and lay snares for its victims.
Such will be the general conditions of the carnivorous kingdom ; every
animal of this species will infallibly unite these qualities ; for its race
could not exist without them. But under these general conditions
there are particular ones, relative to the size, species, and haunts of
the prey, for which each animal is inclined; and each of these
particular conditions result from modifications of the detail in the
formations which they derive from the general conditions; thus,
not only the class, but the order, the genus, and even the species, are
detected in the formation of each part.
For, that the jaw may be enabled to seize, it must have a certain
shaped prominence for the articulation, a certain relation between the
position of the resisting power and that of the strength employed with
the fulcrum: a certain volume in the temporal muscle, requiring an
equivalent extent in the hollow which receives it, and a certain con-
vexity of the zygomatic arch under which it passes: this zygomatic
arch must also possess a certain strength, to give strength to the mas-
seter muscle.
That an animal may carry off his prey, a certain strength is requi-
site in the muscles which raise the head ; whence results a determinate
formation in the vertebre or the muscles attached, and in the occiput
‘where they are inserted.
That the teeth may cut the flesh, they must be sharp; and they
must be so more or less, according as they will have, more or less ex-
62 . ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
elusively, flesh to cut. Their roots should be the more solid, as they
have more and larger bones to break. All these circumstances will in
like manner influence the developement of all those parts which serve
to move the jaw.
That the claws may seize the prey, they must have a certain mo-
bility in the talons, a certain strength in the nails, whence will result
determinate formations in all the claws, and the necessary distribution
of muscles and tendons ; it will be necessary that the fore-arm have a
certain facility of turning, whence again will result determinate for-
mation in the bones which compose it; but the bone of the fore-arm,
articulating in the shoulder-bone, cannot change its structure, without
this latter also change. The shoulder-blade will have a certain de-
gree of strength in those animals which employ their legs to seize
with, and they will thence obtain peculiar structure. The play of all
these parts will require certain properties in all the muscles, and the
impressions of these muscles so proportioned will more fully determine
the structure of the bones.
It may be seen that we could draw equally just conclusions for the
hinder quarters, which contribute to the rapidity of the general move-
ments; as to the formation of the body, the shape of the vertebre,
which influence the ease and flexibility of the motions; as to the
form of nasal bones, of the socket of the eye, of the ear, whose mutual
relation to the perfection of the sense of smelling, seeing, and hearing,
are so palpable. In a word, the formation of the tooth bespeaks the
structure of the articulation of the jaw, that of the scapula, that of the
claws, just as the equation of a curve involves all its properties; and
in taking each property separately, as the basis of a particular equa-
tion, we should find again both the ordinary equation and all the other
certain properties: so the claw, the scapula, the articulation of the
jaw, the thigh bone, and all the other bones separately considered, re-
quire the certain tooth, or the tooth requires them reciprocally; and
beginning with any one, he who possessed a knowledge of the laws of
organic economy, would detect the whole animal.
This principle is sufficiently self-evident, in the usual acceptation,
not to require a farther demonstration ; but when we come to apply it,
there are many cases in which our theoretic knowledge of the mutual
relations of the structure would not be sufficient, if it were not sup-
ported by observation.
We see, for instance, very plainly that hoofed animals must all be
herbivorous, since they have no means of seizing upon their prey ; we
see also that, having no other use for their fore-feet than to support
their bodies, they have no occasion for so powerfully-framed a shoulder; °
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 63
whence we may account for the absence of the clavicle and the acro-
mion, and the straightness of the scapula; not having any occasion to
turn the fore-leg, their radius will be solidly united to the cubitus, or
at least articulated by a hinge-joint, and not by ball and socket, with
the shoulder; their herbaceous diet will require teeth with a broad
surface, to crush seeds and herbs; this breadth must be irregular, and
for this reason the enamelled parts must alternate with the osseous
parts; this sort of surface compelling horizontal motion, for grinding
the food to pieces, the articulation of the jaw cannot form a hinge so
close as in carnivorous animals; it must be flattened, and correspond
with the facing of the temporal bones, more or less flattened; the
temporal cavity, which will only contain a very small muscle, will be
small and shallow, &c. All these are necessary deductions one from
another, according to their greater or lesser universality ; and so that
some are essential and exclusively belonging to hoofed animals, and
others, although equally necessary to those animals, are not peculiar
to them, but are to be found in other animals, where the other general
tules of structure admit of these also. ‘
If we descend to the orders or subdivisions of the class of hoofed
animals, and examine what modifications the general condition un-
dergo, or rather, what peculiar conditions are united to them, accord-
ing to the character proper to each of these orders, the reasons of
these secondary conditions begin to appear less palpable. We soon
perceive, in general terms, the necessity of a digestive system more
complicated in the species where the dental system is more imperfect ;
thus we might say that these should rather be ruminating animals,
where such and such an order of the teeth is wanting; we may de-
duce from it a certain form of the cesophagus, and corresponding for-
mation of the vertebre, of the teeth, &c. But I doubt whether any
one would have guessed, if observation had not suggested it, that
ruminating animals would all have cloven feet, and that they alone
would have them: I doubt whether any one would have guessed that
those only would have horns on the forehead that belong to this class ;
that those amongst them who have sharp eye-teeth are for the greatest
part deficient in horns, &c.
However, since these coincidences are constant, they must have a
satisfactory cause ; but as we do not know it, we ought to supply the
defect of the theory by observation ; it serves us to establish supposi-
tious laws, which become almost as certain as the laws of reasoning,
when they rest on often-repeated observations; so that now, any one
who sees the track of a cleft-foot may conclude that the animal who
left it is ruminant ; and this assertion is as sure as any other in physics
or morality. This foot-mark alone’ gives to the observer both the
64 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
formation of the teeth, the shape of the jaws, the structure of the ver-.
tebre, and the form of all bones of the legs, thighs, shoulders, and
even the frame of the animal which has passed. It is a more certain
mark than all those of Zadig.
Whatever secret reasonings there may be in these relations, it is ob-
servation which has elicited them, independently of general philosophy.
In fact, when we make an assemblage of these facts, we remark not
only a specific consistency, if we may use such a term, between a cer-
tain formation of a certain organ, and a certain formation of a different
organ; but we perceive also a classified consistency, and a corres-
pondent gradation in the developement of these two organs, which
evince, almost as well as an effective reasoning, their mutual influ-
ence.
For example, the dental system of hoofed animals, not ruminant, is
usually more perfect than that of cleft-footed animals, or those which
ruminate, because the former have either incisors or canine teeth,
and generally both in both jaws; and the structure of their foot is
more complicated, because they have more toes, or nails which less
enclose the phalanges, or more separate bones of the metacarpus and
metatarsus, or the bones of the tarsus more numerous, or a more dis-
tinct prominence of the tibia, or in fact, because they unite all these
points. It is impossible to account for these correspondences; but
what proves that they are not the effect of chance, is, that whenever a
cleft-footed animal shows, in the arrangement of its teeth, any tendency
to a similarity with the animals of which we are speaking, it also
evinces a similar tendency in the formation of its feet. Thus camels,
which have canine teeth, and even two or four incisors in the upper
jaw, have a bone more in the tarsus, because their scaphoid is not
united with the cuboid, and very small nails corresponding with the
phalanges which have nails. The chevrotians, whose canine teeth are
much developed, bear a distinct mark along the tibia, whilst other
cleft-footed animals have only, instead of the fibula articulated, a _
small bone along the tibia. There is then a constant harmony be-
tween two organs apparently very distinct from each other; and the
gradations of their formation correspond without alteration, even in
cases where we can assign no cause for the similarity. :
But, in thus adopting the method of observation as an additional
means when theory forsakes us, we arrive at astonishing results. The
least prominence of the bone—the smallest apophysis—has a deter-
mined character relative to the class, the order, the genus, and even
the species to which it belongs; so that whenever we have only the
extremity of a well-preserved bone, we may, by scrutinizing it, and ap-
ae
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 65
plying analogical skill and close comparison, determine all these things
as certainly as if we had the whole animal. I have often in this way
experimented on portions of known animals, before I entirely applied
the test to fossils; but it has always had such infallible success, that
I have no longer any doubt on the certainty of the results which it
afforded.
It is true, that I have been in possession of every assistance which
I required; and my situation and assiduous search of nearly thirty
years* have procured me skeletons of every genus and kind of quad-
rupeds, and even of many species in certain genera, and many indivi-
duals in certain species. With such means, [ have had much ease in
multiplying my comparisons, and verifying, in all their details, the
applications that I made of my laws.
We cannot now dwell longer on this method, and are compelled to
refer to the larger comparative anatomy, which we shall soon produce,
and which will contain all these rules. However, an intelligent reader
will be still able to derive a vast many from the work on fossil bones,
if he will take the trouble to follow all the applications there laid
down. He will see, that it is by this method alone that we have
been guided, and have always found it sufficient to classify each bone
with its species, when it was a living species; to its genera, when it
was of an unknown species ; to its order, when it was of a new genus ;
and finally, to its class, when it belonged to an order not yet esta-
blished; and also to assign it, in these last three cases, the proper
cnaracteristics, to distinguish it from the orders, genera, or species
most resembling it. . Naturalists before us did no more for entire ani-
mals. Thus we have eer and classed the remains of more
than one hundred and fifty mammiferous and oviparous quadrupeds.
The general Results of these Researches.
Considered relatively to the species, more than ninety of these ani-
mals are certainly unkaown to present naturalists; eleven or twelve
have so exact a resemblance to known species, that there can scarcely
be a doubt of their identity ; others present, with the known species,
many points of similarity; but the comparison has not been made
with sufficient accuracy to remove all scruples.
Considered with regard to genera, amongst the ninety unknown
species, there are nearly sixty which belong to new genera; the other
species belong to known genera.
It is not unprofitable to consider these animals with relation to the
class and orders to which they belong.
#1825.
VOL. I, i
66 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
Of the hundred and fifty species, about a fourth are oyiparous quad-
rupeds, and all the others are mammiferous. Amongst these, more
than half belong to non-ruminating hoofed animals.
It would be premature to establish on these researches any conclu-
sion relative to the theory of the earth; because they haye not a ne-
cessary relation to the members of the genera or species which may
be imbedded in our layers. Thus much has been gathered from those
bones of the larger species, which more readily strike the workmen ;
whilst those of the smaller are usually neglected, unless chance brings
them into the hands of a naturalist, or some striking circumstance,
such as their abounding in certain places, should draw the attention
of the common observer.
Relations of the Species with the Strata.
What is more important, and is even the most essential object of
all my toil, and establishes the actual relation with the theory of the
earth, is to know in what layers we find a particular species, and if
there be any general and relative laws either as regards zoological sub-
divisions, or to the greater or lesser resemblance of the species with
those of the present day.
The recognized laws in this respect are very remarkable and very
clear.
First, it is certain that oviparous quadrupeds appear much more fre-
quently than viviparous; that they are ever more abundant, larger, and
more various in the ancient layers than at the actual surface of the
globe.
The ichthyosauri, the plesiosauri, many tortoises, and crocodiles,
are beneath the chalk in the formations commonly called those of Jura.
The monitors of Thuringia would be still more ancient, according to
the opinion of the school of Werner, if the copper slate which includes
them, amidst so many sorts of fishes supposed to be of fresh water
origin, be amongst the most ancient beds of secondary formation.
The immense crocodiles and great tortoises of Maestricht are even in
the chalky layer; but these are marine animals. This first appear-
ance of the fossil bones seems then to prove that there were dry lands
and fresh waters before the formation of the chalk; but neither at
that epoch, nor whilst the chalk was forming, nor even long after-
wards, was it incrusted with the relics of terrestrial mammifera; at
least the small number of those alleged to have been found form only
an exception perfectly immaterial.
We begin to find the bones of marine mammifera, that is, of laman-
tins and seals, in the thick shelly limestone which is above the chalk
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 67
in the neighbourhood of Paris; but there is no bone of a terrestrial
‘mammiferous animal.
In spite of the most indefatigable researches, I have found it im-
possible to discover any distinct trace of this class prior to the layers
_ deposited on the coarser limestone: lignites and molasses certainly
have them; but I much doubt whether these earths are, as is be-
lievedy anterior to the limestone ; the places where they have furnished
bones are too limited and too few, therefore we may suppose there
has been some irregularity or some recurrence in their formation,
On the contrary, when we reach the deposites immediately above the
limestones, the bones of terrestrial animals appear in great numbers.
Thus, as it is rational to believe that shells and fishes did not exist
at the period of the formation of the primordial layers, so may we also
believe that the oviparous quadrupeds began with fishes and the first
production of secondary formations; but that terrestrial quadrupeds
did not appear, at least in considerable numbers, until a long time
afterwards, and when the thick limestone which now contains the
greatest portion of our genera of shells, although different in species,
had been deposited.
We must remark, that these coarse limestone strata, which we make
use of in Paris for building, are the last banks which denote a long
and peaceful flowing of the sea over our own continents. After them
we find layers filled with shells and other marine productions; but
these consist of shifting layers, sands, marls, sand-stones, and soft
clays, which rather denote changes more or less sudden than a quiet
settling ; and, if there be any stony or regular banks of any size be-
neath or above these moving layers, they generally betray marks of
having been deposited from fresh water.
Nearly all the known bones of viviparous quadrupeds are then either
in these deposites of fresh water, or in the alluvial deposites ; and con-
sequently, there is reason to believe that these quadrupeds had not
begun to exist, or at least to leave their relics in the layers that we
are able to fathom, till after the last retreat but one of the sea, and
during that state of things which had preceded its last irruption.
But there is also an order in the arrangement of these bones amongst
themselves ; and this order bespeaks a very remarkable succession in
their species.
First, all the unknown genera, the paleotheria, the anoplotheria,
&c., on the relative situation of which we have certain ideas, belong
to the oldest of the layers in question; to those which rest imme-
diately above the coarse limestone. It is these, principally, which fill
the regular banks, deposited by soft waters or certain shifting beds,
12
68 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
very anciently formed, and generally composed of sand and round
flints, and which were probably the first alluvial deposites of the
ancient world. We find with them certain lost species of known
kinds, but in small numbers, and some oviparous quadrupeds and
fresh-water fishes. The beds which contain them are always more or
less covered over by the shifting beds, filled with shells and other
marine productions.
The most celebrated of these unknown species, which belong to
the known kinds, or to kinds very much resembling those that are
known, such as the fossil elephant, the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus,
and the mastodons, are not found amongst the more ancient kinds.
It is only in the shifting layers that they are discovered, sometimes
with sea-shells, sometimes with the shells of fresh water, but never in
the regular stony beds. All that is found with these species is either
unknown as they are, or at least doubtful.
In fact, the bones of the species which appear the same as ours
only present themselves in the last deposites of alluvions formed on
the banks of rivers, or on the beds of old ponds or dried marshes, or in
the depths of turf layers, or in the clefts and hollows of certain rocks,
or, finally, at a short distance from the surface, in places where they
may have been imbedded by casualties or by the hand of man ; and
their superficial position makes these bones, the most recent of any,
almost always in the worst state of preservation. It must not, how-
ever, be supposed that this classifying of different relative situations is
as clear as that of the species, or that it can have a demonstrative
character equally distinct; there are manifest causes why it cannot
be so..,
First, all my arrangements of species have been made on the bones
themselves, or on good figures ; it was necessary, on the other hand,
that I should have observed myself all the places where these bones
have been discovered. Very often I have been compelled to have re-
course to vague and ambiguous resemblances, made by persons who
did not know what peculiar observations were necessary; and more
frequently still, I have not found any hints at all.
‘Secondly, there must be in this respect infinitely more doubt than with
regard to the bones themselves. ‘The same deposite may appear recent
in places where it is superficial, and ancient in those where it is covered
over by banks which have succeeded it. Ancient layers may have
been transported by partial inundations, and have covered recent bones ;
they may have been buried beneath them, and have enveloped and
mingled with the productions of the ancient seas which they before
contained: ancient bones may have been washed by the waters, and
~
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 69
then taken up by recent alluvial deposites: and recent bones may have
fallen into the clefts and caverns of the ancient rocks, and then have
been enveloped by stalactites or other incrustations. It would be ne-
cessary, in every case, to analyse and justly determine on all these
circumstances which might veil from the sight the real origin of fossils ;
and persons who have collected bones have very seldom doubted of
this necessity ; whence it follows, that the real nature of their geolo-
gical position have nearly always been neglected or misunderstood.
Thirdly, there are some doubtful species, which would more or less
alter the certainty of these results, just as long as clear distinctions
with regard to them were not made out; thus horses and buffaloes,
which are found with elephants, have not yet peculiar and specific ~
characters ; and geologists, who will not adopt my different epochs for
fossil bones, will still be able to draw from them, for many years, an
argument useful and convenient, as it is from my book that they will
derive it.
But although it may be said that these epochs are capable of some
objections with persons who but slightly consider some particular case,
I am no less persuaded that those who will adopt the whole of these
phenomena will not be checked by these small and partial difficulties,
and willacknowledge with me, that there has been one and probably
two successions in the class of quadrupeds before that which now peo-
ples the surface of our continents.
I here expect another objection; one has been made already.
The Extinct Species are not varieties of Living Species.
Why, I am asked, should not the present race be modifications of
those ancient races which we find among fossils, modifications which
would have been produced by local circumstances and change of
climate, and brought to this great difference by a long series of
years?
This objection must appear very cogent with those who believe in
the undefined possibility of the change of forms in organized bodies,
-and who think that with ages and habits every species may change,
one into another, or result from a single one amongst them.
We may answer them in their own way; that, if the species has
gradually changed, we must find traces of these gradual modifications ;
that between the paleotheria and the present species we should have
discovered some intermediate formation ; but to the present time none
of these have appeared.
Why have not the bowels of the earth preserved the monuments of
so remarkable a genealogy, unless it be that the species of former ages
70 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
were as constant as our own; or at least because the catastrophe
that destroyed them had not left them time to give evidence of the
changes?
As to the naturalists who allow that the varieties are confined
within certain limits fixed by nature, it is necessary, in order to
answer them, that we should examine what may be the extent of
these limits—a curious research, very interesting in itself m many
respects, and yet one which has hitherto excited but very little
attention.
This inquiry calls for the definition of a species, which may serve
as the foundation for the use which is made of the term. A species
then includes the individuals which descend from one another, or from
common parents, and those which resemble them as strongly as they resem-
ble one another. Thus we only call the varieties of a species those
races, more or less different, which may have proceeded from them by
generation. Our observations on the distinctions between ancestors
and descendants are consequently our only rational rule; for every
other would enter into hypothesis without proofs.
But in thus considering the variety, we observe that the differences |
which constitute it depend on determinate circumstances, and that
their extent increases with the weight of these circumstances.
Thus the most superficial characteristics are the most changeable ;
colour depends much on light ; the thickness of the fair on the heat ;
the size on the great supply of food. But in a wild animal, even
these varieties are very much limited by its habits, for it will not
willingly leave the place where it finds, in a quantity suited to its
wants, all that is necessary for the support of its species, and then
only to those where it may find them as equally well supplied. Thus,
although the wolf and the fox are found from the torrid to the icy
zone, we rarely find in this vast space very little other difference than
a little more or less beauty in their fur. I have compared the skulls
-of foxes of the north and those of Egypt with those of France, and
have only found individual differences.
Those savage animals which are confined to more limited spaces
vary still less, particularly those which are carnivorous. A thicker
mane makes the only difference between the hyena of Persia and those
of Morocco.
Herbivorous wild animals feel rather more sensibly the influence of
climate, because it more affects their food, which differs in abundance
and quality at various times. Thus elephants will be greater in one”
forest than in another; they will have tusks larger in those places
where the nourishment is more congenial to the formation of the -
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 71
material of ivory; it is the same with rein-deer antl stags, according
to their woods ; but let us take the two most dissimilar elephants, and
we shall not discover the least differences in the number or articula-
tions of their bones, in the structure of their teeth, &c.
_ Besides, the herbivorous species, in a wild state, appear more
limited in their dispersion than carnivorous animals, because the species
of the food unites with the temperature to confine them.
Nature takes care to prevent any alteration of the species which
might result from their mixture, by the mutual aversion which she
has implanted within them. All the plans and the power of man are
called forth to effect these unions, even in the species most alike; and
when the productions are fruitful, which is very rare, the fertility does
not last beyond a few generations, and would not probably take place
without a continuation of the cares which excited them. ‘Thus, we
do not find in the wood intermediate individuals between the hare and
the_rabbit, between the stag and the fallow deer, between the marten
and the pole-cat.
But the sovereignty of man alters this order; it developes all
the variations of which each species is capable, and derives from
_ the production what the species, left to themselves, would never have
- done.
_ Here the degree of variation is still proportioned to the influence of
their cause—which is slavery. It does not rank very high in the
domestic species; as for instance, a cat. Hair of a finer texture,
brighter colours, size greater or less, is all that it proves, but the
skeleton of an Angora cat has no decided or perpetual difference from
that of a wild cat.
From domesticated herbivorous animals, which we transport to
every kind of climate, which we accustom to every sort of food, and
to which we assign labour and nourishment without rule, we obtain
' greater varieties, but still they are only superficial. A greater or
less height—horns longer or shorter, or even entirely wanting—a
lump of fat more or less developed on their shoulders—form the
difference of oxen; and these differences are for along time kept up,
even in those breeds exported from the country in which they were
produced, when proper care is taken to prevent crossing. —
Of this kind are the numerous varieties of sheep which are valuable
for their wool chiefly, because that is the object which has obtained
the greatest attention of mankind. It is still rather less, although
distinctly marked in horses.
In general the forms of the bones vary but little; their struc-
ture, their articulation, the form of their large grinders never vary.
72 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
The small marks of tusks in the domestic pig, and the juncture of
the hoofs in some of this race, are the extreme difference that we have ~
produced in the herbivorous domestic kind.
The most marked effects of the influence of man is evinced on the ©
animal over which he has obtained the most complete conquest—the
dog. This species is so much devoted to man, that even the very
individuals seem to have sacrificed themselves to us, with their
interests and their feelings. Conveyed by man to all parts of the uni-
everse, subjected to every cause capable of influencing their develope
ment, and joined in their union according to the taste of their masters,
dogs vary so much in colour; in the thickness of their hair, which is
sometimes lost ; in their breed; in height, which differs as one to five
in lineary dimensions, which makes more than an hundred fold in the
mass; in the form of the ears, the nose, and the tail;—as to the
relative length of their legs; as to the progressive developement of
the brain in the domestic variety, whence even results the shape of
the head ; sometimes slender, with a sharp nose, and broad forehead ;
sometimes with a short nose and round forehead; as these dif-
ferences are observable in a mastiff and a water spaniel in a
greyhound and a pug; that these effects become more strongly
marked than in those of any wild species of a similar natural genus.
In fact, and this is the maximum of the difference known at the
present time in the animal kingdom, that there are breeds of dogs
which have an additional toe on the hind leg, with correspondent
bones of the tarsus, as there are in the human race some families
having six fingers on each hand.
But in all these varieties the relations of the bones remain the
same, and the shape of the teeth never undergoes any palpable change;
although there are some individuals which have an extra and false
grinder, sometimes on one side, and sometimes on the other *.
There are then, in animals, characteristics which defy all influence,
whether natural or human, and there is nothing which proves to us
that time will effect any more than climate and a state of domestica-
tion. I know that some naturalists rely much on the thousands of
ages which they can accumulate with a stroke of the pen; but in
such matters we can only judge of what length of time would produce,
by multiplying in thought what the least time will effect. I have
endeavoured to collect the most ancient documents of the forms of
animals, and there are no countries which furnish us with older and
* See my brother’s (M. Frederic Cuvier’s) Memoir on the varieties of dogs, inserted
in his ‘Annales du Museum d’Histoire Naturelle.’ This work was done at my
request from the skeletons of all varieties of dogs, expressly prepared.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 73
more abundant specimens than Egypt. It affords us not only the
representations of animals, but their bodies themselves embalmed in
the catacombs.
I have attentively examined the drawings of animals and birds
engraved on the numerous columns brought from Egypt to Rome.
All these figures have (taken as a whole, which must be the way in
which artists consider them,) a perfect resemblance to those of the
same species still existing.
Every one may examine the copies made by Kirker and Zoega;
they have given drawings of them, easily recognized, although not
precisely similar to the originals. We may easily distinguish the
ibis, the vulture, the owl, the falcon, the Egyptian goose, the lapwing,
the landrail, the aspic, the cerustes, the Egyptian hare with its long
ears, and even the hippopotamus ; and in these numerous monuments,
engraved in the great work on Egypt, we sometimes have the rarest
animals—the algazel, for instance, which was not seen in Europe till
within these few years*. y
My learned colleague, M. Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, strongly impressed
with the importance of this research, collected with great care, in the
tombs and temples of Upper and Lower Egpyt, all the mummies of
animals which he could obtain. He brought both cats, ibises, birds
of prey, dogs, monkeys, crocodiles, and an ox’s head embalmed ; and
we cannot find any more differences between these and those of the
present day, than between human mummies and human skeletons of
the present time. Some difference has been found between the mum-
mies of ibis and the bird so called by naturalists of the present day ;
but I have removed all difficulties in an essay on this bird subjoined
to this Disccurse, in which I have shewn that itis at the present time
precisely as it was in the time of the Pharaohs. Iam aware that I
only refer to animals of two or three thousand years, but these are the
- earliest periods to which we are enabled to revert.
There is nothing then in known facts, which can support in the least
the opinion that the new genera which I| have discovered or established
amongst fossils, as well as those detected by other naturalists, the
paleotheria, the anoplotheria, the megalonyces, the mastodontes, the
pterodactyli, the ichthyosauri, &c., could have been the sources of any
animals now existing, which would only differ by the influence of time
or climate ; and although it should be true (which I am far from be-
* The first representation of it from nature is in ‘ La Description de la Menagerie,
by my brother; it is accurately represented in the great work on Egypt. Descr. d’
VEgypte, Ant. t. iv. pl. xlix.
4 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
lieving) that elephants, rhinoceroses, elks and fossil bears, differ no
more from those of the present time, than the race of dogs differ from
each other—we cannot thence determine the identity of the species,
because the race of dogs has been subjected to the influence of domes-
tication, to which these other animals have not nor could not have
been compelled or induced to submit.
Besides, when I assert that the rocky beds contain the bones of va-
rious genera, and the shifting or alluvial strata those of many species
which no longer exist, I do not mean to allege that a new creation
was necessary to produce the species now existing; I only maintain
that they did not exist in the places where we now see them, and that
they must have been deposited there by some other means.
For instance, let us suppose that a great irruption of the sea covers,
with a mass of sand, or other accumulation, the continent of New
Holland; it would bury the carcases of the kangaroos, phascolomys,
dasyuras, perameles, flymg phalanger, echidna, and ornithorynchus,
and would entirely destroy the species of all these genera, since none
of them now exist in any other country.
Suppose that the same revolution were to leave dry the multiplied
small straits which separate New Holland from the continent of Asia,
it would open a way for the elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo, horse,
camel, tiger, and all other Asiatic quadrupeds, which would come and
people a land in which they were before unknown.
If a naturalist, after having well studied the living species, were to
lay open the soil on which they live, he would find the remains of very
different animals.
What New Holland would become, were this supposition realized,
Europe, Siberia, and a great portion of America really are; and it may
one day be discovered in the examination of other countries, and even
of New Holland itself, that they have all experienced similar revolu-
tions—I should say nearly all mutual exchanges of productions ; for,
to carry the supposition still farther, after this transport of Asiatic
animals into New Holland, let us allow that asecond revolution de-
stroyed Asia, their original country ; those who should discover them
in New Holland, their second country, would be as much embarrassed
to find out whence they came, as we now are to discover the origin of
those which are found in our own countries.
I now proceed to apply this reasoning to the human species.
There are no Fossil Human Bones.
It is a fact, that as yet no human bones have been discovered amongst
fossil remains; this is an additional proof that the fossil races were not
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 75
varieties of the species, since they could not have been subjected to
human influence. ~
I beg to be clearly understood, when I say that human bones have
never been found amongst fossils, to mean fossils properly so called,
or, in other words, in the regular layers of the surface of the earth;
for in turf bogs, in alluvial deposites, as well as in burial grounds, we
can as easily disinter human bones, as bones of horses or other common
animals : they may also be found in the clefts of rocks and in grottos,
where the stalactites will have congealed over them; but in the beds
which contain the ancient races, amongst the paleotheria, and even
amongst elephants and rhinoceroses, not a particle of human bone has
ever been discovered. Many of the workmen in the gypsum quarries,
near Paris, think that the bones with which they abound are human ;
but as I have seen many thousands of these bones, I may be allowed to
assert that they have never produced a single bone that ever formed
a part of the human frame. I have examined at Pavia the piles of
bones collected from the isle of Cerigo by Spallanzani, and, in defiance
of the assertion of this celebrated observer, I affirm, in like manner,
that there is not one which can be proved to be human, Scheuchzer’s
homo diluvii testis has been placed since my first edition with its real
genus, that of the salamanders; and in an examination which I have
been since enabled to make at Haarlem, through the kindness of M.
Van Marum, who allowed me to uncover the parts concealed in the
stone, I have substantiated satisfactorily what I before asserted. We
see amongst the bones found at Cronstadt, the fragment of a jaw, and
some articles of human manufacture; but we know that the ground
was dug up without care, and that no observation was made of the
various depths at which each relic was discovered. Besides, in every
instance, the fragments said to be human have been found on examina-
tion to be those of some animal, whether they have been examined
themselves, or by figures of them.
Very lately a pretended discovery was made at Marseilles, in a
quarry, for a long time neglected * ; but they only proved to be marine
productions (tuyaue marins) +. ‘The real human bones were carecases
fallen into clefts of the rock, or left in ancient galleries of mines, or
become incrusted; and I extend this assertion even to the human
skeletons discovered at Guadeloupe { in arock formed of a collection
of madrepores cast up by the sea and united by water strongly imbued
* See le Journal de Marseilles et des Bouches du Rhone, des 27 Sep. 25 Oct. and
ler Nov. 1820.
+ I am convinced of this by the drawings sent by M. Cottard, Professor at the
College of Marseilles.
£ Vide Plate.
76 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
with a calcareous matter *. The human bones found near Koestriz,
and pointed out by M. de Schlotheim, were said to have been extracted
from very ancient beds; but this respectable naturalist is desirous of
making known how much the assertion is still a matter of doubt}. It
is the same with articles of human manufacture. The fragments of
jron found at Montmartre are points of the tools which the workmen
employ in blasting, and which sometimes break in the stone {.
A report has been spread for several months of certain human frag-
* These skeletons, more or less mutilated, are found near Pont du Moule, at the
north-west coast of the high land of Guadeloupe, in a kind of slope resting on the
steep bank of the island, which the water in a great measure covers at high tide, and
which is only a tufa formed and daily increased by the very small particles of shells
and corals which the sea wears away from the rocks, the whole mass of which coberes
very firmly in those parts which are most frequently left dry. We find, with the aid of
a magnifying glass, that many of these fragments have the same red tint as a portion
of the corals contained in the reefs of the island. These sorts of formation are common
in all the Archipelago of the Antilles, and are called by the negroes ma¢onne-bon-dieu.
Their accumulation is the more rapid in proportion as the sea is more violent. They
have extended the plain of the Cayes to San Domingo, whose situation is somewhat
similar to that of the Plage du Moule, and sometimes fragments of vessels of human
workmanship are found at a depth of twenty feet from the surface. A thousand con-
jectures have been made, and events have even been imagined to account for these
skeletons of Guadeloupe; but, after all these circumstances, M. Moreau de Jonnés,
corresponding member of the Academy of Science, who has visited the place, and to
whom I am indebted for all this detail, is of opinion that they are only the carcases of
persons who have been shipwrecked. They were discovered in 1805, by M. Manual
Cortes y Campomanes, at that time a staff-officer in the service of that colony. Gen-
eral Ernouf, the governor, had one extracted with much care. It wanted the head
and nearly all the upper extremities ; it was left at Guadeloupe, with hopes of getting
one more complete, in order to send the two to Paris ; but when the island was taken
by the English, admiral Cochrane, having found this skeleton at head quarters, sent
it to the English Admiralty, who presented it to the British Museum. It is now in
that collection, and M. Keenig, keeper of the mineralogical department, described it
in the Philosophical Transactions of 1814, and I saw it therein 1818. M. Kenig
remarks, that the stone in which it is imbedded has not been cut, but seems to have
been simply inserted as a distinct kernel in the surrounding mass. The skeleton is
so superficial that its presence must have been visible from the projection of some of
the bones. They still contain some of the animal matter, and the whole of their phos-
phate of lime. ‘The rock, entirely composed of parcels of coral and compact lime-
stone, is easily dissolved in nitric acid. M. Koenig has detected fragments of the
millepora miniacea of some madrepores aud shells, which he compares to the helix
acuta and turbo pica. More recently, General Denzelot has extracted another of these
skeletons, now in the cabinet of the king, of which we give an engraving.
It is a body with bent knees. A portion of the upper jaw is still left, the left half
of the lower, nearly all one side of the trunk and pelvis, and a great part of the upper
and lower left extremities. The rock is certainly travertine, in which are imbedded
shells of the neighbouring sea and land shells, which still exist in the island, and
which are known as the bulimus Guadalupensis of Ferrussac.
t+ See Le Traite des Pétrifactions of M. de Schlotheim, Gotha, 1820, p.57; and
his letter in the Isis, of 1820, Sth No., Suppl. No. 6,
+ It4s perhaps necessary to make some mention of the fragments of sand stone,
of which some talk has been made these several years (from 1824), in which a man
and horse were said to have been found petrified. ‘The very fact of its beizg a man
and horse, with the flesh and skin, which must have been visible, was sufficient to in-
form the whole world that it was a lusus nature, and not a real petrifaction.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. VE
ments, having been discovered in caverns in our southern provinces;
but it suffices to say, that, though they have been found, in such a
situation, yet they must be admitted into our general law*.
Yet human bones preserve equally well with those of animals under
similar circumstances. ‘There is no difference between the human
mummies found in Egypt, and those of quadrupeds I collected in the
excavations made some years since in the old church of Saint Gene-
viéve, some human bones interred beneath the first race, which may
have belonged to some prince of the family of Clovis, and which have
still preserved their forms very accurately +. We do not find in ancient
fields of battle that the skeletons of men are more altered than those of
horses, if we allow for the difference of size; and we find among“the
fossils animals as small as rats still very perfectly preserved.
All these tend to confirm the assertion, that the human race did not
exist in the countries where fossil bones are found, at the epoch of the
revolutions which buried these bones; for there cannot be assigned
any reason why mankind should have escaped such overwhelming
catastrophes, nor why human remains should not now be discovered as
well as those of other animals; but I do not wish to conclude that man
did not exist previously to this epoch. He might have inhabited some
confined tract of country, whence he re-peopled the world after these
terrible events; perhaps the places in which he dwelt have been
entirely swallowed up, and his bones buried at the bottom of the
present seas, with the exception of the small number of individuals
who have propagated the species. However it may be, the establish-
ment of man in the country where we have said that the fossil remains
of land animals are found, that is, in the greatest part of Europe,
Asia, and America, is necessarily posterior, not only to the revolutions
which have covered these bones, but even to those which have laid
open the strata which envelope them, and which are the last which the
globe has been subjected to; whence it is clear that we can neither
draw from the bones themselves, nor from the more or less consider-
able masses of rock or earth which cover them, any argument in
favour of the antiquity of the human species in these different
countries.
Physical Proofs of the Newness of the Present State of the Continents.
On the contrary, in closely examining what has taken place on the
surface of the globe, since it was left dry for the last tine, whence
continents have assumed their present form, at least in the highest
* An attentive examination of the situation of these bones, afterwards made, has,
in effect, preved that they were not fossils.
+ Fourcroy has given an analysis. Ann. du Museum, tome x. p. 1.
78 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
parts, we clearly see that the last revolution, and consequently the
establishment of present society, cannot be yery ancient. It is one of
those results, though most clearly proyed, is the least regarded in sound
geology; a result the most valuable, as it unites, in an unbroken chain,
natural and civil history.
In measuring the effects produced in a certain time by actual
causes, and in comparing them with those which they have produced
since the commencement of their operations, we can determine
nearly the very moment whence their action may be dated, which is
necessarily the same as that when our continents received their present
form, or that of the last sudden retreat of the waters.
It is in fact from this retreat that we must begin to calculate the
wearing away of our steep eminences, and the formation of hilly
remains at their bases; that our present rivers began to flow and to
deposit their alluvial spoils; that our present vegetation began to
extend itself and to produce mould; that our present cliffs began to
be worn away by the sea, and that our present downs began to be
accumulated by the wind. Also from this epoch must we calculate
that colonies of the human race commenced or re-commenced to
spread themselves abroad, and to form establishments in places which
nature had assigned to them. I do not speak of volcanoes, not only
because of their irregular irruptions, but because nothing proves that
they could have existed beneath the sea, and therefore they are of no
service in proving what lapse of time has occurred since the last
retreat of it.
Lands Gained by the Perpetual Deposit of Alluvial Matter by Rivers.
MM. Deluc and Dolomieu have most attentively examined the pro-
gress of the lands formed by the deposites of the rivers; and, although
at issue on a great number of points relating to the theory of the
earth, they agree to this: that these alluvial accumulations increase
very rapidly, and must have augmented much more quickly at first,
when mountains afforded more materials for streams, and yet their
extent is but very limited.
The memoir of Dolomieu on Egypt* tends to prove, that, in the
time of Homer, the tongue of land on which Alexander built his city
was not then in existence; that they were able to navigate from the
island of Pharos into the gulf since called lake Mareotis; and that
this gulf was then from fifteen to twenty leagues long, as stated by
Menelaus. The nine centuries then between Homer and Strabo were
sufficient to bring matters to the state described by the latter, and to
* Journal de Physique, tome xlii, p. 40, &c.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 79
reduce this gulf to the form of a lake six leagues long. It is still even
true, that since that period things have undergone a still greater
change. The sands thrown up by the sea and the wind have formed
between the isle of Pharos and the ancient city a tongue of land of
two hundred fathoms in breadth, on which the modern city has been
built. It has blocked up the nearest mouth of the Nile, and dimi-
nished the lake Mareotis to nearly nothing. During this period the
alluvial deposites of the Nile have been left on the banks, and very
much increased their extent.
The ancients were acquainted with these alterations. Herodotus
says, that the priests of Egypt looked on their country as the gift of
the river Nile. It is only a short time, he says, that in a manner the
Delta has appeared*. Aristotle observes, that Homer speaks of
Thebes as if it were the only city of Egypt, and makes no mention of
Memphis+. The Canopian and Pelusian mouths of the Nile were for-
merly the principal ones; and the coast extended in a direct line from
one to the other; it appears so in the charts of Ptolemy; since his
time, however. the water has been cast into the Bolbitian and Phatni-
tic mouths ; and at these entrances the most extensive formations of
accumulated alluvial deposites have been made, which have given a
semicircular contour to the coast. The cities of Rosetta and
Damietta, built on the sea shores at these mouths, less than a thou-
sand years since, are now two leagues distant from it. According to
Demaillet, it would only have required twenty-six years to form a
cape half a league in length in front of Rosetta}.
The height of the soil of Egypt is produced at the same time as the
extension of its surface, and the bottom of the bed of the river is ele-
yated in proportion to the adjacent plains, whence the inundation of
eyery succeeding century much exceeds the height of the marks it left
of its preceeding ones. According to Herodotus, a lapse of nine
hundred years was enough to establish a difference in the level of
seven or eight cubits (ten or twelve feet)§. At Elephantia, the in-
undation now reaches seven feet higher than during the reign of Sep-
timus Severus, at the beginning of the third century. At Cairo, be-
fore it is deemed sufficient for the purpose of irrigating the lands, it
must attain a height of three feet and a half more than was requisite
in the ninth century. The ancient monuments of this country are all
more or less enveloped in the soil. The mud left by the river even
* Herod. Euterpe, v. and xv. ‘+ Arist. Méteor. lib. i. cap. xiv.
+ Demaillet, Descr. de l’Egypte, p: 102 and 103:
§ Herod. Euterpe, xiii.
80 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
covers the small artificial hills, on which the ancient cities were
founded, to a depth of several feet*.
The Delta of the Rhone is no less remarkable for its accumulations.
Astruc details them in his history of Languedoc; and, by a careful
comparison of the descriptions of Mela, Strabo, and Pliny with the
state of the places as they were at the commencement of the eighteenth
century, he proves, by the aid of many writers of the middle ages,
that the arms of the Rhone have extended themselves three leagues
during eighteen centuries ; that the alluvial accumulations of a similar
kind have been formed to the west of the Rhone; and that many
places, situated six or eight centuries back on the bank of the sea
shore or large pools, are now many miles inland. |
Any person may observe in Holland and Italy how rapidly the
Rhine, the Pd, and the Arno, now that they are confined within dykes,
raise their beds; how their mouths approach into the sea by forming
long promontories at their sides; and can judge by these facts how
few centuries these waves have employed in depositing the flat plains
which they at present traverse.
Many cities, which at well-known periods of history were flourish-
ing sea-ports, are now several leagues inland; many have even been
ruined in consequence of this change of situation. Venice can scarcely
preserve the Jagunes which separate her from the continent ; and, in
spite of every exertion, she will one day become united to the main
land f.
We learn from Strabo, that, in the time of Augustus, Ravenna was
amongst lagoons, as Venice now is; and now Ravenna is a league
from the shore. Spina had been founded by the Greeks on the sea
shore; yet in Strabo’s time it was ninety stadia from it, and is now
destroyed. Adria in Lombardy, which had conferred its title on the
sea, of which it formed (during a period of more than twenty centuries)
the principal port, is now six leagues distant from it. Foris has even
reckoned it probable, that, at a period still more remote, the Euganian
mountains might have been islands.
My learned brother of the Institute, M. de Prony, inspector-general
* The the Observations on the Valley of Egypt, and on the regular increase of the
soil which covers it, by M. Girard, in the great work on Egypt, and Mod. Mem. y.
2, p. 343. On which we may remark, that Dolomieu, Shaw, and other good au-
thors, estimate these accumulations much higher than M. Girard. It is to be re-
gretted that the thickness of these layers have not been examined, either on the primi-
tive soil or the natural rock. :
+ See the Memoir of M. Forfait on the lagoons of Venice, with Mem. de la Classe
Phys. del’Inst. vol. v, p. 213. .
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 81
of the bridges and roads, has communicated to me his valuable re-
searches explanatory of these changes in the shores of the Adriatic.
Extract from the Researches of M. De Prony, on the Hydraulic
System of Italy.
(“‘ An Account of the Displacement of that Portion of the Banks of thé Adriatic
Sea occupied by the Mouths of the Po.’’)
‘“That part of the coast of the Adriatic comprised within the
southern extremities of the lake or lagoons of Comachio and those of
Venice has undergone since early times many changes, attested by
many veracious authors, and borne out by the present state of the
soil in the districts on the coast; but it is impossible to detail with
precision the successive progress of these changes, and particularly the
exact measures, previously to the twelfth century of our era.
“We are however sure that the city of Atria, now Adria, was
formerly situated on the sea coast; and this gives us a decided and
known point of the primitive shore, whence the shortest distance to
the present shore, taken from the mouth of the Adige, is 25,000
metres*, (15$ miles and upwards). The inhabitants of the city have
formed very exaggerated notions, in many instances, on the antiquity
of this‘city ; but it cannot be denied that it is one of the most ancient
in Italy : it gave name to the sea which washed its walls. By some
excavations made there and in the vicinity, a stratum mixed with
relics of Etruscan pottery has been discovered, in which there is no
mixture of Roman workmanship; the Etruscan and Roman are found
mingled in an upper stratum, above which the vestiges of a theatre
have been found. Both layers are very much below the present soil.
I have seen in Adria curious collections, in which the relics that they
contain are arranged separately. The prince viceroy, to whom I
observed how interesting it would be to history and geology if a
research were made into all the excavations of Adria, as well in the
primitive soil as in the successive alluvial deposites, seeméd much
struck with my suggestions but I am not aware if they have been
carried into effect.
** On leaving Atria, which was seated at the bottom of a small gulf,
we find, in following the line of coast to the south, a branch of the
Athesis (Adige), and the Fossa Philistina, of which the remaining
trace corresponds with what might have been the re-union of the
* We shall find that the farther extremity of the alluvial promontory formed by the
Po, has advanced into the sea farther-by ten thousand metres (64 miles nearly) than
the mouth of the Adige.
VOL. I, K
82 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
the Mincio and Tartaro, if the Po still flowed southward of Ferraro.
Afterwards we come to the Delta Venetum, which appears to have
occupied the site of the lake or lagoon of Commachio. This Delta was
traversed by seven branches of the Eridanus, or Vadis Padus, Podin-
cus or Po, as it was variously called, which had on its left bank, at the
various ramifications of these mouths, the city of Trigopolis (Trigo-
boli), whose site could not be very distant from Ferraro. The seven
lakes of the Delta were called Septem Maria, and Hatria is sometimes
called Urbs Septem Marium, or the city of the seven seas or lakes.
-** Pursuing the line of coast more north from Hatria, we reach the
principal embouchure or mouth of the Athesis, called also Fossa
Philistina, and A‘stuarium Altini, an island sea, separated from the
ocean by a chain of islets, in the midst of which is a small archipelago
of other islands, called Rialtum, on which cluster Venice now stands.
The Astuarium Altini is the lagoon of Venice, which only commu- -
nicates with the sea by five passages; the small islands which have
been united to form a continuous dyke.
«‘ Rastward of the lagoons, and northward of the city of Este, are
the Euganian mountains, forming in the midst of a vast alluvial plain
a singular and isolated group of conical hills, near which the ancients
fixed the spot of the celebrated fall of Phaéton. Some writers assert
that this fable originated from the vast masses of inflamed materials
cast by the volcanic eruptions into the mouths of the Po. It is certain
that a great quantity of volcanic productions are found in the vicinity
of Padua and Verona.
«« The earliest information which I have attained respecting the si-
tuation of coast of the Adriatic, at the mouths of the Po, has, from the
twelfth century, some exactness. At this period all the waters of the
Po flowed southward of Ferrara into the Po di Volano and the Po di
Primaro, ramifications which then flowed over what is now occupied
by the lagoon of Commachio. The two mouths with which the Po
afterwards made an irruption northward of Ferrara, were called re-
spectively the river of Corbola, Longola, or Mazorno; and the river of
Toi. The former, which was most northward, the Tartaro or Canal
Bianco, near the sea; the latter was increased at Ariano on By a branch
of the Po, called the river Goro.” ‘
«The coast of the sea was possibly inclined from south to north, a _
a distance of ten or twelve thousand metres (between six and eight
English miles) from the meridian of Adria; it then passed the western
angle of Mesola; and Loreo, north of Mesola, was only distant about
two thousand metres (more than a mile).
t
vr
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. > BS
** About the middle of the twelfth century, the great waters of the
Po passed across the dykes which restrained them on the left side of
the coast, near the small city of Ficarolo, situated nineteen thousand
metres (nearly twelve miles) north-west of Ferrara, and, spreading
themselves over the northern territory of Ferrara and the Polesine of
Royvigo, flowed into the two above-mentioned canals of Mazzorno and
Toi. It is well known that the labour of man has had much to do in
effecting this diyersion of the waters of the Po; and historians who
have mentioned this remarkable fact only differ in the detail. The
tendency of the river to follow the new tracks made for it becoming
daily more and more powerful, the two branches of the Volano and the
Primaro rapidly decreased, and were in less than a century reduced
nearly to the state in which they now are, and the main channel of the
river was formed between the mouth of the Adige and the place now
called Porto di Goro. The two canals becoming inadequate, new ones
were dug; and, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, its
principal mouth, called Bocco Tramontana, having approached too
nearly to the mouth of the Adige, it greatly alarmed the Venetians,
who, in 1604, dug the new bed called Taglio de Porto Viro, or Po
delle Fornaci, by means of which the Bocco Maestra was diverted
from the Adige towards the south. _
During the four hundred years which elapsed from the end of the
twelfth to the end of the sixteenth century, the alluvial deposites of
the Po gained considerably on the sea. The northern mouth which
flowed in past the situation of the canal of Mazzorno, and formed the
Ramo Tramcontana, was, in 1600, twenty thousand metres (twelve
miles) from the meridian of Adria; and the southern mouth, which
had taken the place of the canal of Toi, was at the same period seven-
teen thousand metres (ten miles) from that meridian; thus the coast
had become enlarged nine or ten thousand metres (five or six miles)
to the north, and six or seven thousand metres (between three and
four miles) to the south. Between the two mouths of whichI have
spoken was part of the coast, which receded a little, called Sacca di
Goro.
«Tt was during the same interval, between the thirteenth and
seventeenth centuries, that the great works of the embarkments of the
Po were made, and a considerable portion of the western declivities of
the Alps was cleared away and cultivated.
«The canal called Taglio di Porto Viro determines the progress of
‘the alluvial deposites in the great promontory formed by the mouth
of the Po. In proportion as their entrances into the sea are distant,
84 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
the annual quantity of deposites increase in an alarming degree, as
well from the diminution of the inclination of the waters (the neces-
sary cgnsequence of the extent of the bed of the river) as from the
confinement of these waters within dykes, and by the facilities which
the recently cultivated sloping lands afforded of carrying the soil of
the mountains into the ‘plains. Thus the bay of Sacca di Goro was
choked up, and the two promontories formed by the two first mouths
united into one, the present extremity of which is. thirty-two or thirty-
three thousand metres (nineteen to twenty miles) from the meridian of
Adria. Thus, in two centuries, the mouths of the Po have gained
fourteen thousand metres (nearly nine miles) on the sea.
«« Of this hasty sketch these are the results :—
‘1st. That at an early period, the precise date of which cannot us
ascertained, the Adriatic Sea washed the walls of Adria.
“Ondly. That in the twelfth century, before a passage. Hel been
opened at Ficarolo, for the waters of the Po, on the left bank, the sea
shore was removed nine or ten thousand metres (six miles) from
Adria.
“‘3dly. That the extremities of the cromontenies formed by the
two principal mouths of the Po, were, in 1600, before the formation
of the canal of Taglio di Porto Viro, at a mean distance of eighteen
thousand five hundred metres (twelve miles) from Adria; which, since
the year 1200, -gives an extent of alluvial deposite of twenty-five me-
tres (twenty-seven yards one foot and a fraction, English admeasure-
ment*).
«Athly. That the extremity of the single npononteny formed by
the present mouths, is thirty-two or thirty-three thousand metres
(nineteen to twenty miles) from the meridian of Adria; whence we
may conclude the mean progress of the alluvial deposites to be about.
seventy metres (upwards of seventy-six yards) per annum for the last
two centuries, which is a rapidity greater than that of preceding ages.
«* Dz Prowy.”’
M. de Prony having been employed by the government to examine
what remedies could be applied to the devastations occasioned by the
floods of the Po, ascertained that this river, since the time when dykes
inclosed it, had elevated its bed so greatly, that the surface of its waters
is now higher than the roofs of the houses of Ferrara; at the same
time, its alluvial deposites have advanced to the sea with so much
rapidity, that, on a comparison between the ancient charts and the
* The metre was 2 measure adopted during the French revolution of about 393
inches, English measure.—Zyanslator.
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 99
present state, we find that the shore has gained more than six thou-
sand fathoms smce 1604, which is an average of one hundred and fifty
or one hundred and eighty, and in some places, two hundred feet per
annum: The Adige and Po are now more elevated than all the land
which lies between them; and it is only by opening again new chan-
nels in the low lands which they formerly deposited, that we can
avert the disasters. with which they now threaten us.
The same causes have produced the same effects along the branches
of the Rhine and the Meuse; and thus the richest districts of Holland
haye perpetually before them the frightful sight of their waters sus-
pended above their soil, at a height of twenty or thirty feet,
M. Wiebeking, director of the bridges and roads in the kingdom of
Bayaria, has written a memoir on this progress of things, so important
to be well understood by the people and the government, in which he
shows that this property of elevating their beds belongs more or less to
all rivers.
The accumulations along the coasts of the North Sea are not eRe
quickly formed than in Italy. “We can easily trace them in Friesland
and in Groningen, where the first dykes were constructed by the
Spanish governor, Gaspar Robles, in 1570.. A century afterwards
land had been formed in some places three quarters of a league beyond
these dykes; and the city of Groningen itself, partly built on the
ancient soil, on a limestone which does not belong to the present sea,
and in which we find the same shells as in our coarse limestone in the
neigibourhood of Paris, is only six leagues from the sea. Having visited
these places, I can myself testify other well-known facts, the greater
portion of which M. Deluc has already ably explained*. The same
phenomenon may be observed, and with the same exactitude, along
the coasts of East Friesland, and the countries of Bremen and Holstein,
because the parts are known where the new lands were enclosed for
the first time, and thence we can measure what has since been gained.
This alluvial plain, so very fertile, formed by the rivers and the sea,
is in this country a gift the more valuable, as the ancient soil, covered
with heath and turf-bogs (towrbiéres) is incapabie of being made to
produce vegetation ; the alluvial deposites alone supply the means of
subsistence to the inhabited cities established along this coast since the
middle age, and which would not have reached their present opulent
state without the rich lands which the rivers produced for them, and
which they are continually augmenting. —
If the extent which Herodotus assigns to the sea of Azof, which he
* In various parts of the two last volumes of his Letters to the Queen of England.
86 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
makes nearly equal to that of the Euxine * was expressed in less ambi-
guous terms, and if we clearly knew what he meant by the Gerrhus f,
we should find there also strong proofs of the changes produced by the
rivers, and the rapidity with which they are effected; for the alluvial
deposites of the river could alone { during this epoch, that is, for two
thousand two or three hundred years, have reduced the sea of Azof to
its present size, have closed the course of the Gerrhus, or that branch
of the Dnieper which would have united with the Hypacyris, and with
that river have thrown its waters into the gulph Carcinites or Olu-.
Deignitz, and have reduced the Hypacyris itself to nearly nothing §.
We should have proof no less powerful if it were ascertained that the
Oxus or Sihoun, which now disembogues itself into the lake Aral, fell
once into the Caspian sea; but we have close at hand proofs sufficiently
convincing without being compelled to have recourse to any in the
least ambiguous, or to make the geographical ignorance of the ancients
any grounds for our physical proposition ||.
Progress of the Downs.
We have already spoken of the downs or those sand heaps which
the sea throws on flat shores when its bottom is sandy. Wherever
the industry of man has failed in confining them, these downs advance
inland as irresistibly as the alluvial deposites of rivers advance towards
the sea; they drive before them pools formed by the rain-water of the
* Melpom. Ixxxvi. + Ibid. lvi.
¢ This supposed diminution of the Black Sea and the sea of Azof has been attri-
buted to the breaking up of the Bosphorus, which happened at the pretended epoch
of the deluge of Deucalion; and yet, to establish the fact, recourse is had to the suc-
cessive diminutions of the extent assigned to these seas in Herodotus, Strabo, &c.
But, it is quite plain, that, if this diminution had arisen from the rupture of the
Bosphorus, it must have been completed long before the time of Herodotus, and
even the peried called that of Deucalion.
§ See Rennel’s Geography ot_Herodotus, p. 56, &c., and a part of M. Dureau de
Lamalle’s work, called ‘The Physical Geography of the Black Sea, &c. At
present there is only the very small river of Kamennoipost, which can represent the
Gerrhus of Hypacyris of Herodotus.
M. Dureau, p. 170, attributes to Herodotus the making the Borysthenes and Hy-
panis discharge their waters into the Palus Mceotis; but Herodotus only says
(Melp. liii.) that these two rivers flow together on to the same lake, that is, Liman, as
at present. He does not carry the Gerrhus and Hypacyris further.
|| For instance, M. Dureau de Lamalle, in his ‘ Physical Geography of the Black
Sea quotes Aristotle (Meteor. lib. 1. c. 13) as “ telling us that in his time there
were many ancients, periods and peripli, proving that there was a canal leading from
the Caspian Sea to the Palus Meotis.”” But Aristotle says in the passage in question,
(ed. de Duval, i. p. 545) “ From the Paropamisus, amongst other rivers, descend
the Bactrus, the Choaspes, and Araxes, whence the Tanais, a branch of it, takes its
rise into the Palus Meotis.” Who cannot see that this blunder, founded neither on
periods nor peripli, was only the wild ideas of Alexander’s soldiery, who took the
Jaxartes or Tanais of the Transoxian for the Don or Tanais of Scythia? Arrian and
Pliny distinguish them; but this was not the case in Aristotle’s time. How ther
can geological arguments be derived from such geographers?
THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 87
lands in their vicinity, whose progress towards the sea they intercept,
and their advance in many places is made with alarming rapidity.
Forests, buildings, and cultivated fields, are overwhelmed ‘by them.
Those of the Bay of Biscay* -have already covered a number of
villages mentioned in the accounts of the middle ages, and, at this
time in the single department of Landes, they are threatening to
advance with inevitable destruction. One of these villages, that of
Mimisan, has struggled against them for twenty years, and a down
more than sixty feet high is perceptibly approaching it.
In 1802 the pools overflowed five fine farms in the village of St.
Julien.t| They have long since covered an ancient Roman road
leading from Bourdeaux to Bayonne, and which could be seen forty
years ago when the waters were low}. The Adour, which was
known to have formerly passed Old Boucaut, and flowed into the sea
at Cape Breton, is now turned from it more than a thousand fathoms.
The late M. Bremontier, inspector of bridges and roads, who made
great researches on downs, calculated their progress at sixty feet an-
nualy, and in some places at seventy-two. According to his calcula-
tions, they will reach Bourdeaux in two thousand years; and from their
present size rather more than four thousand years must have elapsed
since their accumulation commenced§. The overwhelming of the
cultivated lands of Egypt by the sterile sands of Libya, which the
west wind casts on them, is a phenomenon similar to that of the downs.
These sands have buried a number of cities and villages, whose ruins
may still be seen, and that since the conquest of the country by the
Mahometans, as the tops of mosques and the pinnacles of minarets
are to be seen projecting through the sand,|| Advancing so rapidly
they would doubtlessly have filled the narrow defiles of the valley if
so many ages had elapsed since they began to be cast there. There
would be nothing left between the Libyan chain and the Nile. It is
then a chronometer, the measure of which it would be as easy as inte-
resting to obtain.
Turf-bogs and Slips.
The turf-bogs, so generally produced in the north of Europe by the
accumulation of the remains of sphagna and other aquatic mosses, also
give us a measure of time. They increase in proportion determined
* See the Report of the Downs of the Bay of Biscay by M. Tassin, Mont de Mar-
san, an. X. d
+ Memoirs of M. Bremontier, of the fixing of Downs. +t Tassin loc. Cit.
§ See Bremontier’s Memoir. || Denon—Voyage en Egypte.
{| We may here refer to all travellers who have traversed the western parts of
Egypt.
8s ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF
with regard to each place; they thus envelope the small mounds of
earth on which they are formed. Many of these mounds haye been
covered within the memory of man. In other places the turf-bog
descends along the valleys; it advances like the glaciers, but the
glaciers melt at the base, whilst the turf-bog is impeded by nothing,
By sounding it down to the solid soil, we judge of its antiquity;
and we find with turf-bogs as with downs, that they cannot have com -
menced at an indefinite and very remote epoch. It is the same with
slips, which are made with vast’ rapidity at the base of steep rocks,
and which are still very far from having covered them. But, as no
precise measurements have yet been applied to these two operations,
we shall not expatiate on them farther,*
We see that wherever Nature addresses us, she always uses the
same language—everywhere informs us that the present state of things
has not commenced ata very remote period; and what is nota little
singular, we hear everywhere echoes of the voice of Nature, whether
we consult the authentic traditions of nations, or examine their moral
and political condition, and the intellectual developement which they
had reached at the moment whence their authentic remains take date,
The History of Nations Confirms. the Newness- of the Continents.
Although, at-the first glance, the traditions of some ancient nations,
who extend their origin for so many thousand of years, may seem to
contradict very powerfully. the newness of the present world, yet, when
we examine these-traditions more carefully, we are not long in'con=
cluding that they are not founded in history; on the contrary; we
are:soon convinced that the real history, and all that it has transmitted
to-us of positive proofs of the early establishment of nations, confirms
what the natural records had declared.
The chronology of none of the nations of the west can be traced'un=
broken farther back than three thousand years. None of them can pro-
duce before this epoch, nor even for two or three centuries afterwards;
* These phenomena are well discussed in the Letters of M. Deluc to the Queen of
England, where he treats of the turf-mosses of Westphalia; and in his lefters to
Lametherie, inserted in the Journal de Physique of 1791, &c., as well as those ad-
dressed by him to M. Blumenbach, i798. We may add the interesting details given
in his Geologic. Voyage, vol.i., on the isles of the west coast of the duchy of Sleswic,
and the manner of their union, either with themselves or with the continent, by al-
luvial deposites and turf-bogs S as well as respecting the irruptions which have from
ania to time destroyed or separated some of their parts.
: As to the slips, Mr. Jameson, in a note to his English translation of this Discourse,
ice a@ remarkable instance taken from the steep moehe near Edinburgh, called Salis-
bury Crags. Although of a trifling height, the abrupt and vertical “face is not yet
concealed by the mass of debris accumulated at their feet, and which yet annually
increases.
-
2
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