Thus he was the means of soon producing a number of German authors who made little advance from lack of anatomical knowledge; but afterwards the task fell into the hands of men capable of giving to the newly created palaeontology a remarkable impulse, and one which since then has not abated." Blumenbach,[92] the most eminent and all-round German anatomist and physiologist of his time, one of the founders of anthropology as well as of palaeontology, had meanwhile established the fact that there were two species of fossil cave-bear, which he named _Ursus spelaeus_ and _U.
arctoideus_.

He began to publish his _Archaeologia telluris_,[93] the first part of which appeared in 1803.
From Blainville's useful summary we learn that Blumenbach, mainly limiting his work to the fossils of Hanover, aimed at studying fossils in order to explain the revolutions of the earth.
"Hence the order he proposed to follow was not that commonly followed in treatises on oryctology, namely, systematic, following the classes and the orders of the animal and vegetable kingdom, but in a chronological order, in such a way as to show that the classes, so far as it was possible to conjecture with any probability, were established after or in consequence of the different revolutions of the earth.
"Thus, as we see, all the great questions, more or less insoluble, which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and even discussed by the celebrated professor of Goettingen as early as 1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays of M.G.Cuvier; the errors of distribution in the classes committed by Blumenbach were due to the backward state of geology." The political troubles of Germany, which also bore heavily upon the University of Goettingen, probably brought Blumenbach's labors to an end, for after a second "specimen" of his work, of less importance than the first, the _Archaeologia telluris_ was discontinued.
The French geologist Faujas,[94] who also published several articles on fossil animals, ceased his labors, and now Cuvier began his memorable work.
The field of the labors and triumphs of palaeontology were now transferred to France.

We have seen that the year 1793, when Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were appointed to fill the new zooelogical chairs, and the latter had in 1795 called Cuvier from Normandy to Paris, was a time of renascence of the natural sciences in France.

Cuvier began a course of lectures on comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History.

He was more familiar than any one else in France with the progress in natural science in Germany, and had felt the stimulus arising from this source; besides, as Blainville stated, he was also impelled by the questions boldly raised by Faujas in his geological lectures, who was somewhat of the school of Buffon.