For his wonderful volumes on fossil animals, Cuvier had made some preparation by an essay, presented in 1810 to the Academy, on the geology of the basin of Paris, a district singularly rich in fossil remains. Montmartre and its vicinity, covered with buildings and crowded with people, would not strike many observers as a promising field for scientific exploration; but it is the peculiarity of genius to read instruction where others can find only a blank, or a record of commonplace character. Cuvier discovered in the geological construction and the fossil remains of the Paris basin, elements for the solution of the most critical scientific questions, relative not only to that locality, but to the globe at large. Long before, he had begun to treasure up facts, the collocation of which ultimately constituted his marvellous additions to human knowledge. In 1800 he finds a few teeth, in following years a few bones; and after many years' patience and skill he ascertains and demonstrates the existence and place of a number of tapir-like animals which he classed as _Lophiodon Paleotherium_ and _Anoplotherium_, formerly abounding on the banks of the ponds which have left their mud and marl in the tertiary strata of the Paris basin. His anticipations seemed like prophecies, based, as they were, on a tooth or a bone; but subsequent discoveries enabled him to verify them all, so that they became parts of scientific and general knowledge. The effect of these discoveries on the scientific world was prodigious. "The great work of Cuvier," says Lord Brougham, "stands among those rare monuments of human genius and labor, of which each department of exertion can scarcely ever furnish more than one, eminent therefore above all the other efforts made in the same kind. In the stricter sciences, the 'Principia' of Newton, and in later times its continuation and extension in La Place's 'Mecanique Celeste;' in intellectual philosophy, Locke's celebrated work; in oratory, Demosthenes; in poetry, Homer, leave all competitors behind by the common consent of mankind; and Cuvier's researches in fossil osteology will probably be reckoned to prefer an equal claim to distinction among the works on comparative anatomy." "If," says Cuvier, "you have but the extremity of a bone well preserved, you may, by attention, consideration, and the aid of resources which analogy furnishes to skill, determine all the rest as well as if you had the entire skeleton submitted to you."