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Updated: May 9, 2025
This formation is best seen at Oeningen, in the valley of the Rhine, between Constance and Schaffhausen, a locality celebrated for having produced in the year 1700 the supposed human skeleton called by Scheuchzer "homo diluvii testis," a fossil afterwards demonstrated by Cuvier to be a reptile, or aquatic salamander, of larger dimensions than even its great living representative, the salamander of Japan.
Lamarck's work did not become at all popular while he lived, chiefly through the overpowering influence of Baron Cuvier, who had an equally fantastic scheme of his own, which may well be termed a burlesque on Creation and in which an extreme fixity of "species" was a cardinal doctrine.
It is true, as you suppose, that the death of M. Cuvier has sensibly changed my position; indeed, I have already been asked to continue his work on fishes in connection with M. Valenciennes, who made me this proposition the day after your letter reached me.
My admiration for the noble and gallant horse caused me to glance with less interest at the other animals, although many of them might have deserved the notice of Cuvier himself. There was the donkey which Peter Bell cudgelled so soundly, and a brother of the same species who had suffered a similar infliction from the ancient prophet Balaam.
Eventually, in accordance with the usual marauding habits of the Revolutionary armies, the 'Pongo' skeleton was carried away from Holland into France, and notices of it, expressly intended to demonstrate its entire distinctness from the Orang and its affinity with the baboons, were given, in 1798, by Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier.
Cuvier and Smith were exact contemporaries, both men having been born in 1769, that "fertile year" which gave the world also Chateaubriand, Von Humboldt, Wellington, and Napoleon. But the French naturalist was of very different antecedents from the English surveyor.
The genus Equus is represented as far back as the latter part of the Miocene epoch; but in deposits belonging to the middle of that epoch its place is taken by two other genera, Hipparion and Anchitherium ; and, in the lowest Miocene and upper Eocene, only the last genus occurs. A species of Anchitherium was referred by Cuvier to the Palaeotheria under the name of P. aurelianense.
I have often wondered why it is that men should be so fearful of new ventures in social relationships, when I have found them so fertile, so enjoyable. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the great laws of natural unity.
The history of science well exemplified by that of the development theory is the history of eminent men who have fought against light and have been worsted. The tenacity with which Darwinians stick to their accumulation of fortuitous variations is on a par with the like tenacity shown by the illustrious Cuvier, who did his best to crush evolution altogether.
"At first sight, the termination of the hind-limb of the Gorilla looks very hand-like, and as it is still more so in the lower apes, it is not wonderful that the appellation 'Quadrumana, or four-handed creatures, adopted from the older anatomists by Blumenbach, and unfortunately rendered current by Cuvier, should have gained such wide acceptance as a name for the ape order.
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