Werner often said that "he always depended on the muse for inspiration." His unwritten lecture was a reverie--till kindling in his progress, blending science and imagination in the grandeur of his conceptions, at times, as if he had gathered about him the very elements of nature, his spirit seemed to be hovering over the waters and the strata.

With the same enthusiasm of science, CUVIER meditated on some bones, and some fragments of bones, which could not belong to any known class of the animal kingdom.

The philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins till he constructed numerous species which had disappeared from the globe.
This sublime naturalist has ascertained and classified the fossil remains of animals whose existence can no longer be traced in the records of mankind.

His own language bears testimony to the imagination which carried him on through a career so strange and wonderful.

"It is a rational object of ambition in the mind of man, to whom only a short space of time is allotted upon earth, to have the glory of restoring the history of _thousands of ages which preceded the existence of his race, and of thousands of animals that never were contemporaneous with his species_." Philosophy becomes poetry, and science imagination, in the enthusiasm of genius.