tocrat
of the laboratories of Paris, and the views of quiet, thoughtful,
profound scholars such as Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire were
disdainfully pushed aside, overborne, and the progress of geological
thought was arrested, while, owing to his great prestige, the rising
views of the Lamarckian school were nipped in the bud. Every one, after
the appearance of Cuvier's great work on fossil mammals and of his
_Regne Animal_, was a Cuvierian, and down to the time of Lyell and of
Charles Darwin all naturalists, with only here and there an exception,
were pronounced Cuvierians in biology and geology--catastrophists rather
than uniformitarians. We now, with the increase of knowledge of physical
and historical geology, of the succession of life on the earth, of the
unity of organization pervading that life from monad to man all through
the ages from the Precambrian to the present age, know that there were
vast periods of preparation followed by crises, perhaps geologically
brief, when there were widespread changes in physical geography, which
reacted on the life-forms, rendering certain ones extinct, and modifying
others; but this conception is entirely distinct from the views of
Cuvier and his school,[101] which may, in the light of our present
knowledge, properly be deemed not only totally inadequate, but childish
and fantastic.

Cuvier cites the view of Dolomieu, the well-known geologist and
mineralogist (1770-1801), only, however, to reject it, who went to the
extent of supposing that "tides of seven or eight hundred fathoms have
carried off from time to time the bottom of the ocean, throwing it up in
mountains and hills on the primitive valleys and plains of the
continents" (Dolomieu in _Journal de Physique_).

Cuvier met with objections to his extreme views. In his discourse he
thus endeavors to answer "the following objection" which "has already
been stated against my conclusions":

"Why may not the non-existing races of mammiferous land quadrupeds
be mere modifications or varieties of those ancient races which we
now find in the fossil state, which modifications may have been
produced by change of climate and other local circumstances, and
since raised to the present excessive differences by the operation
of similar causes during a long succession of ages?

"This objection may appear strong to those who believe in the
indefinite possibility of change of forms in organized bodies, and
think tha