As Cuvier provocatively notes, behind the revolutions of nations there lies another type of revolution, that of the planet itself: “The ancient history of the globe, the definitive term towards which all research tends, is also in itself one of the most curious objects to have captured the enlightened mind; and, if one allows oneself to follow, in the infancy of our species, the nearly invisible traces of so many extinct nations, one will also find there, gathered in the shadows of the Earth’s infancy, the traces of revolutions anterior to the existence of all nations.”102
