His work (with that of his co-laborer Brongniart) on the fossils of the Paris basin was probably accurate and logical enough for that limited locality. It was only when he quietly assumed as Werner had done, that the rocks must always occur in this particular order all over the world, or as Whewell expresses it, "promulgated as respecting the world, a scheme collected from a province, and (perhaps) even too hastily gathered from that narrow field"--it was only, I say, when this monstrous assumption was incorporated into his scheme, and he began to call into being his vision of organic creation on the instalment plan, as Werner had done with the minerals, that his great and valuable work for science became tainted with the deadly Cosmological virus, dooming it to death sooner or later. Sherlock Holmes might attempt to diagnose a disease by a mere glance at his patient's boots, but even this gave him more data and was a more logical proceeding than the facts and methods of Cuvier supplied for constructing a scheme of organic creation. It will not be necessary to detail the manner in which the modern "phylogenic series" was gradually pieced together from the scattered fragments here and there all over the globe; but it should be noted here that the whole chain of life was practically complete before any serious attempt was made to study the rocks on the top of the ground, and to find out how this marvellous record of the past =joined on to the modern period=, thus reversing completely the true inductive method, and leaving the most important of all, viz., the rocks containing human remains and other living species, over till the last, with the result that we have for over half a century been laboring under a "Glacial Nightmare," and these deposits on the top of the ground "still remain in many respects the despair of geology." Then came Lyell, Agassiz, and Darwin; and now in the light of the keen discussions instituted by Weismann in the later eighties of the last century, the modern world is pretty well agreed on two results, viz., that so far from natural selection being able to originate a species, it can't possibly =originate= anything at all, and also that no individual can transmit to his descendants what he has himself acquired in his lifetime, and hence it is hard to see how he can transmit what he has not got himself and what none of his ancestors ever had.