n fossil shells--a
rather strange oversight, because he was a friend and admirer of
Lamarck, and succeeded him in one of the two departments of
invertebrates created at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle after Lamarck's
death.

Blainville, who by the way was the first to propose the word
_palaeontology_, shows that the study of the great extinct mammals had
for forty years been held in great esteem in Germany, before Faujas and
Cuvier took up the subject in France. Two Frenchmen, also before 1789,
had examined mammalian bones. Thus Bernard de Jussieu knew of the
existence in a fossil state of the teeth of the hippopotamus.
Guettard[88] published in 1760 a memoir on the fossil bones of Aix en
Provence. Lamanon (1780-1783)[89] in a beautiful memoir described a
head, almost entire, found in the gypsum beds of Paris. Daubenton had
also slightly anticipated Cuvier's law of correlation, giving "a very
remarkable example of the mode of procedure to follow in order to solve
these kinds of questions by the way in which he had recognized a bone of
a giraffe whose skeleton he did not possess" (De Blainville).

"But it was especially in Germany, in the hands of Pallas, Camper,
Blumenbach, anatomists and physicians, also those of Walch, Merck,
Hollmann, Esper, Rosenmueller, and Collini (who was not, however,
occupied with natural history), of Beckman, who had even discussed
the subject in a general way (_De reductione rerum fossilium ad
genera naturalia prototyporum--Nov. Comm. Soc. Scient.
Goettingensis_, t. ii.), that palaeontology applied to quadrupeds had
already settled all that pertained to the largest species."

As early as 1764, Hollmann[90] had admirably identified the bones of a
rhinoceros found in a bone-deposit of the Hartz, although he had no
skeleton of this animal for comparison.

Pallas, in a series of memoirs dating from 1773, had discovered and
distinguished the species of Siberian elephant or mammoth, the
rhinoceros, and the large species of oxen and buffalo whose bones were
found in such abundance in the quaternary deposits of Siberia; and, as
Blainville says, if he did not distinguish the species, it was because
at this epoch the question of the distinction of the two species of
rhinoceros and of elephants, in the absence of material, could not be
solved. This solution, however, was made by the Dutch anatomist Camper,
in 1777, who had brought together at Amsterdam a collection of skeletons
and