Georges Cuvier - Essay on the theory of the earth

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It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species of Remains, which, though absolutely necessary for understanding the history of the globe, have been hitherto almost uniformly neglected.

Georges Cuvier

Thus, commencing our investigation by a careful survey of anyone bone by itself, a person who is sufficiently master of the laws of organic structure, may, as it were, reconstruct the whole animal to which that bone had belonged.

Georges Cuvier

The time is past for ignorance to assert that these remains of organized bodies are mere lusus naturae, — productions generated in the womb of the earth by its own creative powers.

Georges Cuvier

If it be so interesting to us to follow, in the infancy of our species, the almost obliterated traces of extinct nations, why should it not also be so, to search, amid the darkness of the infancy of the Earth, for the traces of revolutions which have taken place anterior to the existence of all nations?

Georges Cuvier