Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/247

 souls, will it be quenched by the dense mists of ignorance around it. Scarcely less fatal to the growth of science is the age of Authority, as the past proves too well. With freedom of thought came definite knowledge and certain progress; but two thousand years was long to wait.

With the opening of the present century began a new era in paleontology, which we may here distinguish as the third period in its history. This branch of knowledge became now a science. Method replaced disorder, and systematic study superseded casual observation. For the next half century the advance was continuous and rapid. One characteristic of this period was, the accurate determination of fossils by comparison with living forms. This will separate it from the two former epochs. Another distinctive feature of this period was the general belief that every species, recent and extinct, teas a separate creation.

At the very beginning of the epoch we are now to consider, three names stand out in bold relief—Cuvier, Lamarck, and William Smith. To these men the science of paleontology owes its origin. Cuvier and Lamarck, in France, had all the power which great talent, education, and station could give; William Smith, an English surveyor, was without culture or influence. The last years of the eighteenth century had been spent by each of these men in preparation for his chosen work, and the results were now given to the world. Cuvier laid the foundation of the paleontology of vertebrate animals; Lamarck, of the invertebrates; and Smith established the principles of stratigraphical paleontology. The investigator of fossils to-day seldom needs to consult earlier authors of the science.

George Cuvier (1769-1832), the most famous naturalist of his time, was led to the study of extinct animals by ascertaining that the remains of fossil elephants which he examined were extinct species. "This idea," he says later, "which I announced to the Institute in the month of January, 1796, opened to me views entirely new respecting the theory of the earth, and determined me to devote myself to the long researches and to the assiduous labors which have now occupied me for twenty-five years."

It is interesting to note here that in this first investigation of fossil vertebrates, Cuvier employed the same method that gave him such important results in his later researches. Remains of elephants had been known to Europe for centuries, and many authors, from Pliny down to the contemporaries of Cuvier, had written about them. Some had regarded the bones as those of human giants, and those who recognized what they were considered them remains of the elephants imported by Hannibal or the Romans. Cuvier, however, compared the fossils directly with the bones of existing elephants, and proved them