Cuvier, moreover, had at his disposition the collection of skeletons of the Museum, which was frequently increased by those of the animals which died in the menagerie.

With his knowledge of comparative anatomy, of which, after Vicq-d'Azyr, he was the chief founder, and with the gypsum quarry of Montmartre, that rich cemetery of tertiary mammals, to draw from, he had the whole field before him, and rapidly built up his own vast reputation and thus added to the glory of France.
His first contribution to palaeontology[95] appeared in 1798, in which he announced his intention of publishing an extended work on fossil bones of quadrupeds, to restore the skeletons and to compare them with those now living, and to determine their relations and differences; but, says Blainville, in the list of thirty or forty species which he enumerates in his tableau, none was apparently discovered by him, unless it was the species of "dog" of Montmartre, which he afterward referred to his new genera Palaeotherium and Anaplotherium.

In 1801 (le 26 brumaire, an IX.) he published, by order of the Institut, the programme of a work on fossil quadrupeds, with an increased number of species; but, as Blainville states, "It was not until 1804, and in tome iii.

of the _Annales du Museum_, namely, more than three years after his programme, that he began his publications by fragments and without any order, while these publications lasted more than eight years before they were collected into a general work"; this "_corps d'ouvrage_" being the _Ossemens fossiles_, which was issued in 1812 in four quarto volumes, with an atlas of plates.
It is with much interest, then, that we turn to Cuvier's great work, which brought him such immediate and widespread fame, in order to see how he treated his subject.

His general views are contained in the preliminary remarks in his well-known "Essay on the Theory of the Earth" (1812), which was followed in 1821 by his _Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_.
It was written in a more attractive and vigorous style than the writings of Lamarck, more elegant, concise, and with less repetition, but it is destitute of the philosophic grasp, and is not the work of a profound thinker, but rather of a man of talent who was an industrious collector and accurate describer of fossil bones, of a high order to be sure, but analytical rather than synthetical, of one knowing well the value of carefully ascertained and demonstrated facts, but too cautious, if he was by nature able to do so, to speculate on what may have seemed to him too few facts.