Page:A Treatise on Geology, volume 1.djvu/113

 CH. V. five or six posterior true molars are quinquecuspidate; the anterior false molars are tricuspid and bicuspid, as in the opossums. Of the four remaining teeth, three in front are incisors, the fourth is a canine tooth. (See Buckland's Bridgwater Treatise, pl. 2. B.)

Another section, supposed by Owen to be more positively related to marsupialia, is named Phascolotherium. The only species, P. Bucklandi, is represented below (fig. 32.).

It has eleven teeth on each side of the lower jaw; three or four are true quinquecuspid molars, as many tricuspid false molars, three incisors and one canine.



Phascolotherium Bucklandi. (From Buckland's Bridgwater Treatise.)

Those persons who, confiding in what are somewhat hastily called general views, believe too strictly in the gradual change and sequence of organic life on the globe, and have pictured to themselves the early land and sea as tenanted only by the simpler (and, as they are erroneously termed, inferior or imperfect) forms of life, while in each succeeding period new, more complicated, and more exalted plants and animals were called into being, till man was at last awakened to the supremacy of creation, will find the fossil quadrupeds of Stonesfield a very puzzling anomaly. On the contrary, the geologist who, in the full spirit of Cuvier, regards the systems of life as definitely related now, and at all past periods, to the contemporaneous physical conditions of the globe, and uses the remains of plants and animals as