Palaeontology, Geology, Zoology, Biology

Abstract

During the first decades of the nineteenth century, attention shifted from mineralogy, the study of inorganic matter, to palaeontology, the study of the fossils of extinct animals and plants found in the rocks. The great comparative anatomist G.F. de Cuvier, who would confidently infer the structure of an entire extinct creature from a single bone, is cited by Byron.

The reader will perceive that the author has partly adopted in this poem the notion of Cuvier, that the world had been destroyed several times before the creation of man. This speculation, derived from the strata and the bones of enormous and unknown animals found in them, is not contrary to the Mosaic account, .…

Lord Byron, Cain: A Mystery (1821), Prefatory Note.