[Reviews of works by George Cuvier].

Date:
[1830?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: [Reviews of works by George Cuvier]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    19/38 (page 361)
    able, that, notwithstanding the knowledge we possess of the anatomy of the ornithorhyncus, one of these monotremata, naturalists are not agreed as to the class to which that animal belongs, Cuvier regarding it as a viviparous quadruped, Lesson as a bird allied to the penguin, and Geoffroy St. Hilaire as belonging to an oviparous class, between quadrupeds and birds. The only fossil species hitherto discovered belonging to the order edentata, are the niegalonyx of Jefferson, from North America, the great megatherium from Paraguay, and another gigantic, though still unknown species, of which Cuvier has only been able to examine the plaster model of a phalanx found in a pit of sand and gravel, supposed to have been formed by deposition from the Rhine, near Eppelsheim, in Hesse. The fossil species of marine mammalia are much more numerous, and Cuvier has described and figured the remains of extinct species of seals, lamantins, dolphins, narwals, whales, and cetaceous animals allied to the hyperoodons and cachalots, which he is particularly enabled to illustrate, by means of the rich collection of these animals preserved in his museum in the Garden of Plants. He has not, however, described all the remains of these animals in his possession, but has selected only those which afforded the means of being satisfactorily determined. By thus pointing out many species of marine mammalia, which are now extinct, he has further confirmed the conclusion to which naturalists had been led by the study of fossil conchology ; that not only the productions of the land have been changed by the revolutions which have taken place on the surface of the globe, but that the sea itself, the chief agent in most of these revolutions, has changed its inhabitants. The gigantic bulk and force of the cetacea have not better protected their species in the ocean, than the size and strength of the elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, mastodons, and megatheria, have enabled them to resist on land the revolutions which have destroyed their race. It is not a little remarkable, that among the fossil remains of vertebrate animals, there should so seldom he found the bones either of birds or of serpents. This cannot be ascribed merely to the delicacy of their skeleton, and the consequent difficulty of preserving it in the rocky strata, or of collecting its parts, from these ancient beds, as we find in many of the older strata, the skeletons of the smallest fishes preserved with the most delicate spines of their fins uninjured. The saurian reptiles are much more common, and the batrachia are also frequently found in a fossil state. The crocodile, of all the saurian reptiles, presents the nearest affinities in its oste- ology.