had never been observed by him or any other naturalist was another
indication of nature’s mutability: in the past, it had operated differently—
more intensely and more savagely—than it did at present.
“The thread of operations is broken,” Cuvier wrote. “Nature has
changed course, and none of the agents she employs today would have
been sufficient to produce her former works.” Cuvier spent several years
studying the rock formations around Paris—together with a friend, he
produced the first stratigraphic map of the Paris basin—and here, too, he
saw signs of cataclysmic change. The rocks showed that the region had, at
various points, been submerged. The shifts from one environment to the
other—from marine to terrestrial, or, at some points, from marine to
freshwater—had, Cuvier decided, “not been slow at all”; rather, they had
been brought about by sudden “revolutions on the surface of the earth.”
The most recent of these revolutions must have occurred relatively
recently, for traces of it were still everywhere apparent. This event,
Cuvier believed, lay just beyond the edge of recorded history; he observed
that many ancient myths and texts, including the Old Testament, allude to
some sort of crisis—usually a deluge—that preceded the present order.
Cuvier’s ideas about a globe wracked periodically by cataclysm proved
very nearly as influential as his original discoveries. His major essay on
the subject, which was published in French in 1812, was almost
immediately reprinted in English and exported to America. It also
appeared in German, Swedish, Italian, Russian, and Czech. But a good deal
was lost, or at least misinterpreted, in translation. Cuvier’s essay was
pointedly secular. He cited the Bible as one of many old (and not entirely
reliable) works, alongside the Hindu Vedas and the Shujing. This sort of
ecumenicalism was unacceptable to the Anglican clergy who made up the
faculty at institutions like Oxford, and when the essay was translated into
English, it was construed by Buckland and others as offering proof of
Noah’s flood.
The empirical grounds of Cuvier’s theory have, by now, largely been
disproved. The physical evidence that convinced him of a “revolution”
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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