Page:The Hunterian Oration,1838.djvu/41

THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. 33 and skill, the indefatigable ardour and diligence of the illustrious, may I not add immortal Cuvier.

Even of that sublime science of these our days, which connects the history of our planet with that of its extinct races, which has based their classification on the anatomical correspondence and uniformity of design, manifest in the organic remains of periods remotely antecedent to the creation of man and the existing types of mortality, it is indisputable that Hunter had a prophetic vision. For proof of this I may refer not only to his rich fossil collection, including at his decease about 1050 specimens, but to his interesting posthumous paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1794, on the Fossil Bones found in the Caverns of the Principality of Bayreuth. In this paper he compares these specimens with their recent analogues, and shows that they differ both from them and among themselves.

He alludes to the different climates and localities of the globe to which animals are more or less confined, or their geographical distribution, which, considered in relation to fossil remains, elucidates by implication the changes of temperature to which different parts of the earth have been subject at different periods.

With more distinctness and detail he points out the evidence which fossils afford of the alteration of the condition of the earth’s surface, as dry land or