Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/181

Rh, guided the researches of paleontologists ever since. Even that feat of paleontology which has so powerfully impressed the popular imagination, the reconstruction of an extinct animal from a tooth or a bone, is based upon the simplest imaginable application of the logic of Steno. A moment's consideration will show, in fact, that Steno's conclusion that the glossopetræ are sharks' teeth implies the reconstruction of an animal from its tooth. It is equivalent to the assertion that the animal of which the glossopetræ are relics, had the form and organization of a shark; that it had a skull, a vertebral column, and limbs similar to those which are characteristic of this group of fishes; that its heart, gills, and intestines presented the peculiarities which those of all sharks exhibit; nay, even that any hard parts which its integument contained were of a totally different character from the scales of ordinary fishes. These conclusions are as certain as any based upon probable reasonings can be. And they are so, simply because a very large experience justifies us in believing that teeth of this particular form and structure are invariably associated with the peculiar organization of sharks, and are never found in connection with other organisms. Why this should be we are not at present in a position even to imagine; we must take the fact as an empirical law of animal morphology, the reason of which may possibly be one day found in the history of the evolution of the shark tribe, but for which it is hopeless to seek for an explanation in ordinary physiological reasonings. Every one practically acquainted with paleontology is aware that it is not every tooth nor every bone which enables us to form a judgment of the character of the animal to which it belonged, and that it is possible to possess many teeth, and even a large portion of the skeleton of an extinct animal, and yet be unable to reconstruct its skull or its limbs. It is only when the tooth or bone presents peculiarities which Ave know by previous experience to be characteristic of a certain group that we can safely predict that the fossil belonged to an animal of the same group. Any one who finds a cow's grinder may be perfectly sure that it belonged to an animal which had two complete toes on each foot, and ruminated; any one who finds a horse's grinder may be as sure that it had one complete toe on each foot and did not ruminate; but, if ruminants and horses were extinct animals of which nothing but the grinders had ever been discovered, no amount of physiological reasoning could have enabled us to reconstruct either animal, still less to have divined the wide differences between the two. Cuvier, in the "Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe," strangely credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others, with the invention of a new method of paleontological research. But if you will turn to the "Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles," and watch Cuvier, not speculating but working, you will find that his method is neither more nor less than that of Steno. If he was able to make his famous prophecy from the jaw which lay upon the surface