by him, unless it was the
species of "dog" of Montmartre, which he afterward referred to his new
genera Palaeotherium and Anaplotherium. In 1801 (le 26 brumaire, an IX.)
he published, by order of the Institut, the programme of a work on
fossil quadrupeds, with an increased number of species; but, as
Blainville states, "It was not until 1804, and in tome iii. of the
_Annales du Museum_, namely, more than three years after his programme,
that he began his publications by fragments and without any order, while
these publications lasted more than eight years before they were
collected into a general work"; this "_corps d'ouvrage_" being the
_Ossemens fossiles_, which was issued in 1812 in four quarto volumes,
with an atlas of plates.

It is with much interest, then, that we turn to Cuvier's great work,
which brought him such immediate and widespread fame, in order to see
how he treated his subject. His general views are contained in the
preliminary remarks in his well-known "Essay on the Theory of the Earth"
(1812), which was followed in 1821 by his _Discours sur les Revolutions
de la Surface du Globe_.

It was written in a more attractive and vigorous style than the writings
of Lamarck, more elegant, concise, and with less repetition, but it is
destitute of the philosophic grasp, and is not the work of a profound
thinker, but rather of a man of talent who was an industrious collector
and accurate describer of fossil bones, of a high order to be sure, but
analytical rather than synthetical, of one knowing well the value of
carefully ascertained and demonstrated facts, but too cautious, if he
was by nature able to do so, to speculate on what may have seemed to him
too few facts. It is also the work of one who fell in with the current
views of the time as to the general bearing of his discoveries on
philosophy and theology, believing as he did in the universality of the
Noachian deluge.

Like Lamarck, Cuvier independently made use of the comparative method,
the foundation method in palaeontology; and Cuvier's well-known "law of
correlation of structures," so well exemplified in the vertebrates, was
a fresh, new contribution to philosophical biology.

In his _Discours_, speaking of the difficulty of determining the bones
of fossil quadrupeds, as compared with fossil shells or the remains of
fishes, he remarks:[96]

"Happily comparative anatomy possessed a principle which, well
developed, was capable of overcoming ev