h.

"Thus, as we see, all the great questions, more or less insoluble,
which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and
even discussed by the celebrated professor of Goettingen as early as
1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays
of M. G. Cuvier; the errors of distribution in the classes committed
by Blumenbach were due to the backward state of geology."

The political troubles of Germany, which also bore heavily upon the
University of Goettingen, probably brought Blumenbach's labors to an end,
for after a second "specimen" of his work, of less importance than the
first, the _Archaeologia telluris_ was discontinued.

The French geologist Faujas,[94] who also published several articles on
fossil animals, ceased his labors, and now Cuvier began his memorable
work.

The field of the labors and triumphs of palaeontology were now
transferred to France. We have seen that the year 1793, when Lamarck and
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were appointed to fill the new zooelogical chairs,
and the latter had in 1795 called Cuvier from Normandy to Paris, was a
time of renascence of the natural sciences in France. Cuvier began a
course of lectures on comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural
History. He was more familiar than any one else in France with the
progress in natural science in Germany, and had felt the stimulus
arising from this source; besides, as Blainville stated, he was also
impelled by the questions boldly raised by Faujas in his geological
lectures, who was somewhat of the school of Buffon. Cuvier, moreover,
had at his disposition the collection of skeletons of the Museum, which
was frequently increased by those of the animals which died in the
menagerie. With his knowledge of comparative anatomy, of which, after
Vicq-d'Azyr, he was the chief founder, and with the gypsum quarry of
Montmartre, that rich cemetery of tertiary mammals, to draw from, he had
the whole field before him, and rapidly built up his own vast
reputation and thus added to the glory of France.

His first contribution to palaeontology[95] appeared in 1798, in which he
announced his intention of publishing an extended work on fossil bones
of quadrupeds, to restore the skeletons and to compare them with those
now living, and to determine their relations and differences; but, says
Blainville, in the list of thirty or forty species which he enumerates
in his tableau, none was apparently discovered