It is not true anatomists like Hunter, Camper, Pallas, Vicq-d'Azyr, Blumenbach, Soemmering, and Meckel who would be so presuming, and M.G.Cuvier would have been himself much embarrassed if he had been taken at his word, and besides it is this assertion which will remain formulated in the mouths of the ignorant, and which has already made many persons believe that it is possible to answer the most difficult and often insoluble problems in palaeontology, without having made any preliminary study, with the aid of dividers, and, on the other hand, discouraging the Blumenbachs and Soemmerings from giving their attention to this kind of work." Huxley has, _inter alia_, put the case in a somewhat similar way, to show that the law should at least be applied with much caution to unknown forms: "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.

If he was able to make his famous prophecy from the jaw which lay upon the surface of a block of stone to the pelvis which lay hidden in it, it was not because either he or any one else knew, or knows, why a certain form of jaw is, as a rule, constantly accompanied by the presence of marsupial bones, but simply because experience has shown that these two structures are cooerdinated" (_Science and Hebrew Tradition.

Rise and Progress of Paleontology_ 1881, p.

23).
[99] _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_ (1879).
[100] The following statement of Cuvier's views is taken from Jameson's translation of the first _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_, "which formed the introduction to his _Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles_," the first edition of which appeared in 1812, or ten years after the publication of the _Hydrogeologie_.