ublished, and vertebrate paleontology became a science. Among
other things of great popular interest the book contained the first
authoritative description of the hairy elephant, named by Cuvier the
mammoth, the remains of which bad been found embedded in a mass of
ice in Siberia in 1802, so wonderfully preserved that the dogs of the
Tungusian fishermen actually ate its flesh. Bones of the same species
had been found in Siberia several years before by the naturalist Pallas,
who had also found the carcass of a rhinoceros there, frozen in a
mud-bank; but no one then suspected that these were members of an
extinct population--they were supposed to be merely transported relics
of the flood.

Cuvier, on the other hand, asserted that these and the other creatures
he described had lived and died in the region where their remains were
found, and that most of them have no living representatives upon the
globe. This, to be sure, was nothing more than William Smith had tried
all along to establish regarding lower forms of life; but flesh and
blood monsters appeal to the imagination in a way quite beyond the power
of mere shells; so the announcement of Cuvier's discoveries aroused the
interest of the entire world, and the Ossements Fossiles was accorded a
popular reception seldom given a work of technical science--a reception
in which the enthusiastic approval of progressive geologists was mingled
with the bitter protests of the conservatives.

"Naturalists certainly have neither explored all the continents," said
Cuvier, "nor do they as yet even know all the quadrupeds of those parts
which have been explored. New species of this class are discovered from
time to time; and those who have not examined with attention all the
circumstances belonging to these discoveries may allege also that the
unknown quadrupeds, whose fossil bones have been found in the strata
of the earth, have hitherto remained concealed in some islands not yet
discovered by navigators, or in some of the vast deserts which occupy
the middle of Africa, Asia, the two Americas, and New Holland.

"But if we carefully attend to the kind of quadrupeds that have been
recently discovered, and to the circumstances of their discovery, we
shall easily perceive that there is very little chance indeed of our
ever finding alive those which have only been seen in a fossil state.

"Islands of moderate size, and at a considerable distance from the large
continents, have very