III.—The Fauna and Flora of the European Loess, being a Reply to Professor Dr. Nehring

Extract

It is not every controversialist who has the good fortune to persuade two such distinguished warriors as Baron Richthofen and Dr. Nehring to buckle on their armour and do battle with him; and if there were room for vanity in the shifting panorama of Science, I might at least claim to have stated my case with sufficient point and clearness to make it necessary for more than one elaborate reply. There is no room for vanity however. It matters not who wins, so far as I am concerned, if we only get our difficult problem more sifted and get closer to the truth. If there be no room for vanity, there is less for irony; and I am not surprised that Dr. Nehring should feel hurt if he thinks I have openly or covertly had the indecency to sneer at himself or his work. In referring to Cuvier, it was not to minimize what Dr. Nehring has done, but to do justice to an old philosopher, whose memory I reverence, and whose claims had been overlooked by Baron Richthofen. It was he, I must emphatically repeat, if it needs repetition before such an audience as that reached by the Geological Magazine, who first proved the fauna of the European Loess and its correlated deposits in its broad features to be identical with that found under the Siberian tundras. Cuvier was followed by a great crowd of diligent and close students of this subject, especially in France and America, without naming England.