About twenty years later Dr. Buckland published a discussion of
the subject, in the light of various discoveries in the drift
and in caves. It received wide attention, but theology was
soothed by his temporary concession that these striking relics
of human handiwork, associated with the remains of various
extinct animals, were proofs of the Deluge of Noah.
In 1823 Boue, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, showed to
Cuvier sundry human bones found deep in the alluvial deposits of
the upper Rhine, and suggested that they were of an early
geological period; this Cuvier virtually, if not explicitly,
denied. Great as he was in his own field, he was not a great
geologist; he, in fact, led geology astray for many years.
Moreover, he lived in a time of reaction; it was the period of
the restored Bourbons, of the Voltairean King Louis XVIII,
governing to please orthodoxy. Boue's discovery was, therefore,
at first opposed, then enveloped in studied silence.
Cuvier evidently thought, as Voltaire had felt under similar
circumstances, that "among wolves one must howl a little"; and
his leading disciple, Elie de Beaumont, who succeeded, him in
the sway over geological science in France, was even more
opposed to the new view than his great master had been.
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