Page:Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1837, volume 1.djvu/76

 72 fossil remains. After stating by what slow degrees the cabinets of Paris had been filled with innumerable fragments of bones of unknown animals, from the gypsum quarries of Mont Martre, Cuvier thus records the manner in which he applied himself to the task of reconstructing their skeletons. Having gradually ascertained that there were numerous species, belonging to many genera, "I at length found my self," says he, "as if placed in a charnel house, surrounded by mutilated fragments of many hundred skeletons, of more than twenty kinds of animals, piled confusedly around me: the task assigned me was, to restore them all to their original position. At the voice of comparative anatomy, every bone, and fragment of a bone, resumed its place. I cannot find words to express the pleasure I experienced in seeing, as I discovered one character, how all the consequences, which I predicted from it, were successively confirmed; the feet were found in accordance with the characters announced by the teeth; the teeth in harmony with those indicated beforehand by the feet; the bones of the legs and thighs, and every connecting portion of the extremities, were found set together precisely as I had arranged them, before my conjectures were verified by the discovery of the parts entire: in short, each species was, as it were, reconstructed from a single one of its component elements." (Cuvier's Ossemens Fossiles, 1812, tom. iii. Introduction, p. 3, 4.)

Thus, by placing before his readers the progress of his discovery, and restorations of unknown species and genera, in the same irregular succession in which they occurred to him, he derives from this disorder the strongest demonstration of the accuracy of the principles which formed his guide throughout the whole inquiry; the last found fragments confirming the conclusions he had drawn from those first brought to light, and his retrograde steps being as nothing, in comparison with his predictions which were verified. Discoveries thus conducted, demonstrate the constancy of the laws of co-existence that have ever pervaded all animated