or bracelet fashioned so long ago. Common sense directs us to discard such
a fantastic interpretation in favor of the view that fossils are what they
seem to be--simply relics of creatures that lived when the earth was
younger.

Until this common sense view was adopted there was no science of
palæontology. Cuvier was the first great naturalist to devote particular
attention to the mainly unrelated and unverified facts that had been
discovered before his time. He was truly the originator of this branch of
zoölogy, for he brought together the observations of earlier men and
extended his own studies widely and surely, emphasizing particularly the
necessity for noting carefully the geological situation of a fossil in
rocks of an older or later period of formation. His great result was the
demonstration that many groups of animals existed in earlier ages that
seem to have no descendants of the same nature to-day, and also that many
or most of our modern groups are not represented in the earliest formed
sedimentary rocks, although these recent forms possess hard parts which
would surely be present somewhere in these levels if the animals actually
existed in those times. But the meaning of these facts escaped Cuvier's
mind. He was a believer in special creation, like Linnæus and all but a
few among his predecessors, and he explained the diversity of the faunas
of different geological times in what seems to us a very simple and naïve
way. In the beginning, he held, when the world was created, it was
furnished with a complete set of animals and plants. Then some great
upheaval of nature occurred which overwhelmed and destroyed all living
creatures. The Creator then, in Cuvier's view, proceeded to construct a
new series of animals and plants, which were not identical with those of
the former time, but were created according to the same general working
plans or architectural schemes employed before. Another cataclysm was
supposed to have occurred, which destroyed the second series of organisms