CHAPTER II. 
THE EXTINCTION OF SPECIES. 
. Nature lends such evil dreams, 
So careful of the type she seems, 
So careless of the single life. 
So careful of the type ? but no. 
From scarped cliff and quarried stone 
She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone : 
I care for nothing, all shall go.’ ” 
—Tennyson. In Memoriam. lv., Ivi. 
A CENTURY ago it was held to be impossible that any 
species should ever become extinct. When the hairy 
elephant known as the mammoth was first discovered, it 
required the arguments of acute reasoners to persuade an 
unbelieving world that this species of elephant differed 
in any essential degree from the elephants which still 
survive. 
“It was in 1796 that Cuvier announced that the teeth and bones 
of the European fossil elephants were distinct in species from both 
the African and the Indian elephant, the only two living species. 
This fundamental fact opened out to him new views about the 
creation of the world and its inhabitants, and a rapid glance over 
other fossil bones in his collection showed him the truth and the 
value of this great idea (namely, the existence of extinct types), to 
which he consecrated the rest of his life.”—(H. N. Hutchinson. 
Extinct Monsters. Second edition, p. 194.) 
Since that day science has achieved one of her greatest 
successes in making us acquainted with these extinct 
species. Disjecta membra have been collected, skeletons