Page:Surrey Archaeological Collections Volume 1.djvu/85

 tered bones, so as to afford, by analogy, no small probability of an accurate estimate as to their structure, their size, and even their habits of life. And this recalls to my recollection a most striking discovery of a disciple of Cuvier with reference to one of those animals, which, so far as we know, human eye had never seen, and of which, in this instance, it happens that no vestige of the substance remains; not one fragment of its bones, not a shred of its skin.

Ask yourselves, then, for one moment, how was it possible to acquire any knowledge respecting it? Does not this, at first sight, appear an almost impossible task? Do not the difficulties in the way appear insuperable? Yet these difficulties were overcome by the school of Cuvier; and how? Why, by the footsteps which this animal, in his lifetime, had impressed upon the sand of the sea-shore. Those footsteps had become petrified in the course of years; and from the examination of these, a follower of Cuvier was enabled to deduce—first, from the intervals between them, a calculation as to the size of the animal; then, from the configuration of the steps, a calculation as to the order of animals to which it might have belonged, comparisons with other animals whose footsteps are the same, or similar; and thus, with no other positive vestige remaining than these petrified footsteps on the shore, the pupil of Cuvier was enabled to construct—not as a vague theory, not as a mere guess, unsupported by experiment, but as the result of analytical reasoning, and of analogies in similar cases—a most probable system as to the size, the structure, nay, even the habits of the animal!

I say then that it is by the application of a similar process, by this careful exercise of the deductive faculties that the archæologist arrives at similar results.