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These comprehensive laws, announced by Agassiz in his "Poissons Fossiles," and afterward constantly reiterated by him, have indeed been adopted by the writers on evolution, though with a wholly different interpretation.
Hence it is that all his later zoological investigations tend to a common aim, namely, to give by farther studies, equally conscientious but more extensive, a broader and more solid basis to those laws which he had read in nature and which he had proclaimed at that early date in his immortal work, 'Poissons Fossiles. Let us not be astonished that he should have remained faithful to these views to the end of his life.
"I feel within myself the strength of a whole generation," he wrote to his father at that time, and launched himself upon the publication of his costly "Poissons Fossiles" with no clear vision of the quarter from whence the payment might be expected to come.
Agassiz, having previously referred some of these fragments to the class of fishes, was the first to recognise their crustacean character, and, although at the time unable correctly to determine the true relation of the several parts, he figured the portions on which he founded his opinion, in the first plate of his "Poissons Fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge." Parka decipiens, Fleming.
By its aid he obtained a new means of ascertaining the relations between fossil and living mollusks. It was of vast service to him in preparing his "Etudes critiques sur les Mollusques fossiles," a quarto volume with nearly one hundred plates.
His work on the "Poissons Fossiles," which placed him in a few years in the front rank of European scientific men, took form at once in his fertile brain. MUNICH, January 18, 1830. . . .My resolve to study medicine is now confirmed. I feel all that may be done to render this study worthy the name of science, which it has so long usurped.
The "Poissons Fossiles" had shown him the peril of entering upon such an enterprise without capital. Perhaps he would never have dared to undertake it but for a friendly suggestion which opened a way out of his perplexities. Mr.
The principal metacarpal and metatarsal bones are flatter than they are in any of the Equidoe; and the metacarpal bones are longer than the metatarsals, as in the Paloeotheria. In its general form, Plagiolophus resembles a very small and slender horse, and is totally unlike the reluctant, pig-like creature depicted in Cuvier's restoration of his Paloeotherium minus in the "Ossemens Fossiles."
I hope I shall be wise enough not to be tempted even by the prospect of a new edition of the 'Poissons Fossiles."
Cuvier, in the "Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe," strangely credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others, with the invention of a new method of palaeontological research. But if you will turn to the "Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles" and watch Cuvier, not speculating, but working, you will find that his method is neither more nor less than that of Steno.
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