Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/569

Rh paleontologists, the author showed that real cetaceans were not yet known in the deposits anterior to the Miocene. To M. Gervais are owing, in the study of fossil reptiles, some valuable observations on the footprints of the large batrachians called cheirotherium in the Triassic sandstones of Lodève.

Most of M. Gervais's publications were both zoölogical and paleontological. Some were of a more general character. Among these was the "Medical Zoölogy" ("Zoölogie Médicale"), which was published conjointly by him and M. Van Beneden in 1850, and is remarkable for the prominence given to the lower animals and to the theory of parasitism which is developed in it; and a natural history of the mammalia ("Histoire Naturelle des Mammifères"), 1855, in which attention is given to the habits of animals, and to their relations to the arts, commerce, and agriculture. This work, which is in two volumes, abounds in original observations, the fruit of the personal researches of the author, which have in many instances modified the views previously held by mammalogists. He was also the author of "A Theory of the Human Skeleton" ("Théorie du squelette Humain"), 1856; of the "Metamorphosis of Organisms and Alternating Generations" ("De la Metamorphose des Organisms et des Générations Alternantes"), 1861; on the "Antiquity of Man" ("De l'Ancienneté de l'Homme"), 1863; of "Elements of the Natural Sciences" ("Élements des Sciences naturelle"), 1856; and of many notes, memoirs, and articles in the "Dictionary of the Natural Sciences," "Patria," "A Million Facts," "The Jardin des Plantes," and "La Nature." The wide range of subjects covered in these books testifies to the extent of his knowledge and the diversity of his talents. "In a science prodigiously vast," says M. Blanchard, "he showed himself familiar with most of the subjects, and was accounted among the most erudite." M. Gervais was elected to the Academy of Sciences in January, 1864, and with this he gained one of the great objects of his ambition. After working for nearly forty-five years, to the great profit and advantage of science, he died, from an illness of several months' duration, as poor as he had been in the earlier days of his career.

has criticised, in the "Educational Weekly," Dr. Wilson's theory that a new American race is to be produced by the absorption of the Indian race with the white. Admitting, he reasons, that the white American race is acquiring peculiar characteristics, and that these are not unlike those of the Indian, may it not be the work of the American environment, rather than that of intercrossing with Indians, of which there is no sufficient evidence, but which is contradicted by indisputable genealogies in some cases where the approach to likeness is apparent? Sir Charles Dilke asserted, in his "Greater Britain," that the white American race was growing like the red Indian. The assertion seemed broad and strong, but something of the kind seems to be indicated in this discussion.