Although his conclusions were well supported, they did not completely overthrow the opposing views, and become a fixed basis in geology. When, at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, fossil remains were being exhumed in great quantities in the Paris basin, Cuvier, the great French naturalist, reëstablished the doctrine that fossils are the remains of ancient life. An account of this will be given presently, and in the mean time we shall go on with the consideration of a question raised by the conclusions of Steno. Fossil Deposits Ascribed to the Flood.--After it began to be reluctantly conceded that fossils might possibly be the remains of former generations of animals and plants, there followed a period characterized by the general belief that these entombed forms had been deposited at the time of the Mosaic deluge. This was the prevailing view in the eighteenth century. As observation increased and the extent and variety of fossil life became known, as well as the positions in which fossils were found, it became more difficult to hold this view with any appearance of reason. Large forms were found on the tops of mountains, and also lighter forms were found near the bottom. Miles upon miles of superimposed rocks were discovered, all of them bearing quantities of animal forms, and the interpretation that these had been killed and distributed by a deluge became very strained. But to the reasoners who gave free play to their fancies the facts of observation afforded little difficulty. Some declared that the entire surface of the earth had been reduced to the condition of a pasty mass, and that the animals drowned by the Deluge had been deposited within this pasty mass which, on the receding of the waters, hardened into rocks. The belief that fossil deposits were due to the Deluge sensibly declined, however, near the close of the eighteenth century, but was still warmly debated in the early part of the nineteenth century. Fossil bones of large tropical animals having been discovered about 1821, embedded in the stalagmite-covered floor of a cavern in Yorkshire, England, some of the ingenious supporters of the flood-theory maintained that caves were produced by gases proceeding from the bodies of decaying animals of large size; that they were like large bubbles in the crust of the earth, and, furthermore, that bones found in caverns were either those from the decayed carcasses or others that had been deposited during the occurrence of the Flood. Even the utterances of Cuvier, in his theory of catastrophism to which we shall presently return, gave countenance to the conclusion that the Deluge was of universal extent. As late as 1823, William Buckland, reader in geology in Oxford, and later canon (1825) of Christ Church, and dean (1845) of Westminster, published his _Reliquiæ Diluvianæ_, or _Observations on the Organic Remains Attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge_.