It is a very remarkable circumstance that, from the commencement of the
serious study of fossil remains; in fact, from the time when Cuvier
began his brilliant researches upon those found in the quarries of
Montmartre, palaeontology has shown what she was going to do in this
matter, and what kind of evidence it lay in her power to produce.
I said just now that, in the existing Fauna, the group of pig-like
animals and the group of ruminants are entirely distinct; but one of the
first of Cuvier's discoveries was an animal which he called the
_Anoplotherium_, and which proved to be, in a great many important
respects, intermediate in character between the pigs, on the one hand,
and the ruminants on the other. Thus research into the history of the
past did, to a certain extent, tend to fill up the breach between the
group of ruminants and the group of pigs. Another remarkable animal
restored by the great French palaeontologist, the _Palaeotherium_,
similarly tended to connect together animals to all appearance so
different as the rhinoceros, the horse, and the tapir. Subsequent
research has brought to light multitudes of facts of the same order;
and, at the present day, the investigations of such anatomists as
Ruetimeyer and Gaudry have tended to fill up, more and more, the gaps in
our existing series of mammals, and to connect groups formerly thought
to be distinct.
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