Image from page 119 of "Water reptiles of the past and present" (1914) (14770656414)

Identifier: waterreptilesofp1914will
Title: Water reptiles of the past and present
Year: 1914 (1910s)
Authors: Williston, Samuel Wendell, 1851-1918
Subjects: Aquatic reptiles
Publisher: Chicago, Ill., The University of Chicago Press
Contributing Library: Boston Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Boston Public Library



Text Appearing Before Image:
nother observer by the name of Baierdiscovered other and similar vertebrae in the vicinity of Altorfwhich he described and figured as those of a fish; and there wasmuch earnest contention between Scheuchzer and Baier, as alsobetween their friends, as to their supposed nature. Scheuchzersfigure was often cited as indubitable evidence of the destruction ofmankind by a universal flood, and it was not until nearly a centurylater that Cuvier showed that the bones were really those of amarine reptile. It must be recollected, in extenuation of so extraordinary ablunder on the part of so learned a man as was Scheuchzer, who,as a physician and professor, one would think ought to have beenable to distinguish between vertebrae so different as are those of anichthyosaur and a man, that, during all of the eighteenth century 107 io8 WATER REPTILES OF THE PAST AND PRESENT and well into the nineteenth, the belief was prevalent that allfossils were the relics of animals and plants that had perished in
Text Appearing After Image:
Fig. 51.—Restoration of Ichthyosaurus with young, by Charles R. Knight. (Bypermission of the American Museum of Natural History.) the great biblical flood. The science of geology was yet in itsinfancy, and there was no known record, other than the biblicalone, of any great inundation of the earths surface which might ICHTHYOSA URIA 109. account for the remains of sea-animals in rocks remote from theseas. This belief, so long held by even the wisest and most learnedof scholars, so long welcomed by the theologians as proof of theliteral accurracy of the Bible, was one of which Scheuchzer wasquite convinced. His Piscium Querulae was largely a fantasticdiscussion of the supposed great world-catastrophe, the NoachianDeluge, by which the fishes had been destroyed and long imprisonedin the rocks through no sin of their own. It was the same author who, in a subsequent work, described andfigured the fossil skeleton of a large salamander which he believedto be that of a child destroyed in the