Have you never launched into the immensity of time and space as you
read the geological writings of Cuvier? Carried by his fancy, have you
hung as if suspended by a magician's wand over the illimitable abyss
of the past? When the fossil bones of animals belonging to
civilizations before the Flood are turned up in bed after bed and
layer upon layer of the quarries of Montmartre or among the schists of
the Ural range, the soul receives with dismay a glimpse of millions of
peoples forgotten by feeble human memory and unrecognized by permanent
divine tradition, peoples whose ashes cover our globe with two feet of
earth that yields bread to us and flowers.
Is not Cuvier the great poet of our era? Byron has given admirable
expression to certain moral conflicts, but our immortal naturalist has
reconstructed past worlds from a few bleached bones; has rebuilt
cities, like Cadmus, with monsters' teeth; has animated forests with
all the secrets of zoology gleaned from a piece of coal; has
discovered a giant population from the footprints of a mammoth. These
forms stand erect, grow large, and fill regions commensurate with
their giant size. He treats figures like a poet; a naught set beside a
seven by him produces awe.
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