176 HISTORY OF GEOLOGY FROM 1780 TO 1835 Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy Organic fossils had been known for centuries and by the eighteenth century few doubted that they were former living organisms Fossil collecting became a popular, and even lucrative, pastime, especially when large specimens of ammonites, ichthyosaurs, ancient fishes, mammoths, etc., were discovered Many collections, in private or public hands, were initiated It was Georges Cuvier, Professor of Zoology at the Muse´ um d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, who began to establish some fundamental principles for the study of fossils (see Famous Geologists: Cuvier) He started by trying to reassemble collections of mastodon bones from America They were manifestly creatures rather similar to modern elephants, so he used the known arrangement of elephant bones for purposes of comparison, in order to reconstruct the mastodon skeleton In this work, he recognized that the total structure must be one in which all the parts fit together to form a ‘working whole’; and the structures must be such as to enable the creatures to live successfully in their ‘conditions of existence’ This ‘goodness of fit’ necessarily applied to the lost soft parts as well as those that had become fossilised So Cuvier enunciated his principle of ‘co-ordination of parts’ However, most fossils were shells, etc., and it was Cuvier’s colleague Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who was responsible for collecting and studying these He was the first to make a formal distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates and state the major divisions of the latter Only then could invertebrate palaeontology make a proper start It was less easy to make comparative anatomical studies for fossil invertebrates than for vertebrates, though Charles Darwin (see Famous Geologists: Darwin) later famously did so with barnacles In examining the fossil record, Cuvier found that there were substantial and apparently sudden changes in the fossil record as one ascended the stratigraphic column This finding largely holds to this day for macrofossils, though smooth trends are known for foraminifera The biostratigraphic ‘breaks’ were, in fact, convenient for stratigraphic investigations and mapwork such as that conducted by William Smith, but their theoretical explanation was difficult, using modern analogies as Cuvier had done for his mastodon work Cuvier’s explanation was couched in terms of sudden and catastrophic events (which we might call mega-tsunamis), of unknown cause, perhaps of global extent (Cuvier was inconsistent in his statements as to the universality or otherwise of his catastrophes) Famously, he wrote that in these supposed events ‘‘the thread of operations is here broken; the march of Nature is changed’’ His doctrine was later dubbed ‘catastrophism’ by William Whewell, and there was the suggestion that the very laws of nature were broken or suspended during such catastrophes; or past events were quite unlike anything occurring today Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers such as Steno (see Famous Geologists: Steno) had sometimes propounded ‘catastrophist’ theories of the Earth because they had a greatly compressed timescale for Earth history, supposedly in line with the ‘Biblical’ age of the Earth, of some 6000 years This was not Cuvier’s view He wrote: ‘‘Genius and science have burst the limits of space; Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by means of observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the succession of events which preceded the birth of the human race?’’ This was the voice of modern geology His theory envisaged geological direction and progress, taking place over unspecifiably great periods of time However, he was unable to account for the origin of new living forms (unlike Lamarck, he was no evolutionist) He thought there was a catastrophe some 5000–6000 years ago Geology and Religion/Theology It is easy to overplay the connections between geology and religion in the early years of the nineteenth century But they certainly existed and were interesting and important One line of approach, taken by the Swiss naturalist Jean-Andre´ de Luc, who was greatly concerned to ‘harmonise’ geology and Biblical history, was to suppose that there had been a great catastrophe, perhaps 5000 years ago, which separated history into antediluvian and postdiluvian eras, the division being associated with the Noachian Flood The period since the Flood could be estimated by the rate of lake infilling, or thickness of peat accumulations Such evidences almost allowed the date of the Flood to be quantified empirically Antediluvian time could be regarded as virtually limitless, the ‘days’ of Creation being of unspecified duration De Luc’s empirical work was, in fact, leading him towards a date corresponding with what we regard as the end of the last ice age Nature was playing him a cruel trick! At Oxford, there had been lectures in geology for many years The field fell into desuetude in the late eighteenth century but the Reverend William Buckland gave popular lectures there from 1814 to 1849, and particularly in his early years he endeavoured to show linkages between Cuvierian geology and Biblical history, identifying Cuvier’s last catastrophe with the Noachian Flood Buckland specially interested himself in cave deposits, supposing that the animal bones found therein might be the remains of animals that had sheltered in the caves or had been washed