have an origin, the
descriptions given of them bear the most unequivocal marks; as in almost
all of them we see merely the different parts of known animals united by
an unbridled imagination, and in contradiction to every established law
of nature."(2)

Having shown how the fabulous monsters of ancient times and of foreign
nations, such as the Chinese, were simply products of the imagination,
having no prototypes in nature, Cuvier takes up the consideration of the
difficulty of distinguishing the fossil bones of quadrupeds.

We shall have occasion to revert to this part of Cuvier's paper in
another connection. Here it suffices to pass at once to the final
conclusion that the fossil bones in question are the remains of an
extinct fauna, the like of which has no present-day representation on
the earth. Whatever its implications, this conclusion now seemed to
Cuvier to be fully established.

In England the interest thus aroused was sent to fever-heat in 1821 by
the discovery of abundant beds of fossil bones in the stalagmite-covered
floor of a cave at Kirkdale, Yorkshire which went to show that England,
too, had once had her share of gigantic beasts. Dr. Buckland, the
incumbent of the chair of geology at Oxford, and the most authoritative
English geologist of his day, took these finds in hand and showed that
the bones belonged to a number of species, including such alien forms as
elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, and hyenas. He maintained that all
of these creatures had actually lived in Britain, and that the caves in
which their bones were found had been the dens of hyenas.

The claim was hotly disputed, as a matter of course. As late as 1827
books were published denouncing Buckland, doctor of divinity though he
was, as one who had joined in an "unhallowed cause," and reiterating the
old cry that the fossils were only remains of tropical species washed
thither by the deluge. That they were found in solid rocks or in caves
offered no difficulty, at least not to the fertile imagination of
Granville Penn, the leader of the conservatives, who clung to the old
idea of Woodward and Cattcut that the deluge had dissolved the entire
crust of the earth to a paste, into which the relics now called fossils
had settled. The caves, said Mr. Penn, are merely the result of gases
given off by the carcasses during decomposition--great air-bubbles, so
to speak, in the pasty mass, becoming caverns when the waters receded
and the pas