[Illustration: Fig. 162. _Paleotherium magnum._] The Paleothere, above alluded to, resembled the living tapir in the form of the head, and in having a short proboscis, but its molar teeth were more like those of the rhinoceros (see fig. 163.). _Paleotherium magnum_ was of the size of a horse, 3 or 4 feet high. The annexed woodcut, fig. 162., is one of the restorations which Cuvier attempted of the outline of the living animal, derived from the study of the entire skeleton. When the French osteologist declared in the early part of the present century, that all the fossil quadrupeds of the gypsum of Paris were extinct, the announcement of so startling a fact, on such high authority, created a powerful sensation, and from that time a new impulse was given throughout Europe to the progress of geological investigation. Eminent naturalists, it is true, had long before maintained that the shells and zoophytes, met with in many ancient European rocks, had ceased to be inhabitants of the earth, but the majority even of the educated classes continued to believe that the species of animals and plants now contemporary with man, were the same as those which had been called into being when the planet itself was created. It was easy to throw discredit upon the new doctrine by asking whether corals, shells, and other creatures previously unknown, were not annually discovered? and whether living forms corresponding with the fossils might not yet be dredged up from seas hitherto unexamined? But from the era of the publication of Cuvier's Ossements Fossiles, and still more his popular Treatise called "A Theory of the Earth," sounder views began to prevail. It was clearly demonstrated that most of the mammalia found in the gypsum of Montmartre differed even generically from any now existing, and the extreme improbability that any of them, especially the larger ones, would ever be found surviving in continents yet unexplored, was made manifest. Moreover, the non-admixture of a single living species in the midst of so rich a fossil fauna was a striking proof that there had existed a state of the earth's surface zoologically unconnected with the present order of things. [Illustration: Fig. 163. Upper molar tooth of _Paleotherium magnum_ from Isle of Wight. (Owen's Brit. Foss. p. 317.) Reduced one-third.] _Gres de Beauchamp_ (2. _b_, Table, p. 175.).--In some parts of the Paris basin, sands and marls, called the Gres de Beauchamp, or Sables Moyens, divide the gypseous beds from the underlying Calcaire grossier. These sands contain more than 300 species of marine shells, many of them peculiar, but others common to the underlying marine deposit (No. 2. _c_.).