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Updated: June 11, 2025
I said just now that, in the existing Fauna, the group of pig-like animals and the group of ruminants are entirely distinct; but one of the first of Cuvier's discoveries was an animal which he called the Anoplotherium, and which proved to be, in a great many important respects, intermediate in character between the pigs, on the one hand, and the ruminants on the other.
To divers worn copies of Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Ovid, Cæsar's Commentaries, and Catullus; to ditto ditto of Homer, Lucian, Aristophanes, Balzac, Anacreon, Bacon's Essays, and Moore's Melodies; to Dwight's Theology uncut copy, Heine's Poems very much thumbed, Saint Simon very ragged, two volumes of Les Causes Célèbres, Tone's Memoirs, and Beranger's Songs; to Cuvier's Comparative Anatomy, Shroeder on Shakespeare, Newman's Apology, Archbold's Criminal Law and Songs of the Nation; to Colenso, East's Cases for the Crown, Carte's Ormonde, and Pickwick.
Nor even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar impressions effaced. And however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters.
But the meaning of these facts escaped Cuvier's mind. He was a believer in special creation, like Linnæus and all but a few among his predecessors, and he explained the diversity of the faunas of different geological times in what seems to us a very simple and naïve way. In the beginning, he held, when the world was created, it was furnished with a complete set of animals and plants.
Cuvier's contention that all the larger vertebrates of the existing age are known to naturalists was borne out by recent explorations, and there seemed no refuge from the conclusion that the fossil records tell of populations actually extinct. But if this were admitted, then Smith's view that there have been successive rotations of population could no longer be denied.
They are of Cuvier's order of animal life, known as the articulata, or animals whose bodies consist of a series of moveable joints. These are mostly inhabitants of the sea, and rank in the animal kingdom as the highest class of the Articulata, except the insects, who head the order. The tables upon which the Crustacea or are deposited, are numbered from 13 to 24.
But the "elephants caught in the ice," and Cuvier's "instantaneous change of climate," seem to me no more intelligible today than when I wrote my Asiatic fragments. According to all that we know of the decrease of heat in the earth, I cannot understand such a change of temperature in a space of time which does not also allow for the decaying of flesh.
For there are numerous organisms presenting the closest resemblance to Heteromita, and, like it, grouped under the general name of "Monads," which, nevertheless, can be observed to take in solid nutriment, and which, therefore, have a virtual, if not an actual, mouth and digestive cavity, and thus come under Cuvier's definition of an animal.
Both sexes of the wild turkey are ultimately furnished with a tuft of bristles on the breast, but in two-year-old birds the tuft is about four inches long in the male and hardly apparent in the female; when, however, the latter has reached her fourth year, it is from four to five inches in length. On Ardetta, Translation of Cuvier's 'Regne Animal, by Mr. Blyth, footnote, p. 159.
It is an excellent illustration of Cuvier's sagacity, and he evidently takes some pride in telling his story about it. A split slab of stone arrived from the quarries of Montmartre, the two halves of which contained the greater part of the skeleton of a small animal.
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