Chapter 9

LAMARCK THE FOUNDER OF INVERTEBRATE PALÆONTOLOGY

It was fortunate for palæontology that the two greatest zoölogists of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Lamarck and Cuvier, lived in the Paris basin, a vast cemetery of corals, shells, and mammals; and not far from extensive deposits of cretaceous rocks packed with fossil invertebrates. With their then unrivalled knowledge of recent or existing forms, they could restore the assemblages of extinct animals which peopled the cretaceous ocean, and more especially the tertiary seas and lakes.

Lamarck drew his supplies of tertiary shells from the tertiary beds situated within a radius of from twenty-five to thirty miles from the centre of Paris, and chiefly from the village of Grignon, about ten miles west of Paris, beyond Versailles, and still a rich collecting ground for the students of the Museum and Sorbonne. He acknowledges the aid received from Defrance,[81] who had already collected at Grignon five hundred species of fossil shells, three-fourths of which, he says, had not then been described.

Lamarck's first essay ("_Sur les fossiles_") on fossils in general was published at the end of his _Système des Animaux sans Vertèbres_ (pp. 401-411), in 1801, a year before the publication of the _Hydrogéologie_. "I give the name _fossils_," he says, "to remains of living beings, changed by their long sojourn in the earth or under water, but whose forms and structure are still recognizable.

"From this point of view, the bones of vertebrate animals and the remains of testaceous molluscs, of certain crustacea, of many echinoderms, coral polyps, when after having been for a long time buried in the earth or hidden under the sea, will have undergone an alteration which, while changing their substance, has nevertheless destroyed neither their forms, their figures, nor the special features of their structures."

He goes on to say that the animal parts having been destroyed, the shell remains, being composed of calcareous matter. This shell, then, has lost its lustre, its colors, and often even its nacre, if it had any; and in this altered condition it is usually entirely white. In some cases where the shells have remained for a long period buried in a mud of some particular color, the shell receives the same color.

"In France, the fossil shells of Courtagnon near Reims, Grignon near Versailles, of what was formerly Touraine, etc., are almost all still in this calcareous state, having more or less completely lost their animal parts--namely, their lustre, their peculiar colors, and their nacre.

"Other fossils have undergone such an alteration that not only have they lost their animal portion, but their substance has been changed into a silicious matter. I give to this second kind of fossil the name of _silicious fossils_, and examples of this kind are the different oysters ('des ostracites'), many terebratulæ ('des terebratulites'), trigoniæ, ammonites, echinites, encrinites, etc.

"The fossils of which I have just spoken are in part buried in the earth, and others lie scattered over its surface. They occur in all the exposed parts of our globe, in the middle even of the largest continents, and, what is very remarkable, they occur on mountains up to very considerable altitudes. In many places the fossils buried in the earth form banks extending several leagues in length."[82]

Conchologists, he says, did not care to collect or study fossil shells, because they had lost their lustre, colors, and beauty, and they were rejected from collections on this account as "dead" and uninteresting. "But," he adds, "since attention has been drawn to the fact that these fossils are extremely valuable _monuments_ for the study of the revolutions which have taken place in different regions of the earth, and of the changes which the beings living there have themselves successively undergone (in my lectures I have always insisted on these considerations), consequently the search for and study of fossils have excited special interest, and are now the objects of the greatest interest to naturalists."

Lamarck then combats the views of several naturalists, undoubtedly referring to Cuvier, that the fossils are extinct species, and that the earth has passed through a general catastrophe (_un bouleversement universel_) with the result that a multitude of species of animals and plants were consequently absolutely lost or destroyed, and remarks in the following telling and somewhat derisive language:

"A universal catastrophe (_bouleversement_) which necessarily regulates nothing, mixes up and disperses everything, is a very convenient way to solve the problem for those naturalists who wish to explain everything, and who do not take the trouble to observe and investigate the course followed by nature as respects its production and everything which constitutes its domain. I have already elsewhere said what should be thought of this so-called universal overturning of the globe; I return to fossils.

"It is very true that, of the great quantity of fossil shells gathered in the different countries of the earth, there are yet but a very small number of species whose living or marine analogues are known. Nevertheless, although this number may be very small, which no one will deny, it is enough to suppress the universality announced in the proposition cited above.

"It is well to remark that among the fossil shells whose marine or living analogues are not known, there are many which have a form closely allied to shells of the same genera known to be now living in the sea. However, they differ more or less, and cannot be rigorously regarded as the same species as those known to be living, since they do not perfectly resemble them. These are, it is said, extinct species.

"I am convinced that it is possible never to find, among fresh or marine shells, any shells perfectly similar to the fossil shells of which I have just spoken. I believe I know the reason; I proceed to succinctly indicate, and I hope that it will then be seen, that although many fossil shells are different from all the marine shells known, this does not prove that the species of these shells are extinct, but only that these species have changed as the result of time, and that actually they have different forms from those individuals whose fossil remains we have found."

Then he goes on in the same strain as in the opening discourse, saying that nothing terrestrial remains constant, that geological changes are continually occurring, and that these changes produce in living organisms a diversity of habits, a different mode of life, and as the result modifications or developments in their organs and in the shape of their parts.

"We should still realize that all the modifications which the organism undergoes in its structure and form as the result of the influence of circumstances which would influence this being, are propagated by generation, and that after a long series of ages not only will it be able to form new species, new genera, and even new orders, but also each species will even necessarily vary in its organization and in its forms.

"We should not be more surprised then if, among the numerous fossils which occur in all the dry parts of the globe and which offer us the remains of so many animals which have formerly existed, there should be found so few of which we know the living analogues. If there is in this, on the contrary, anything which should astonish us, it is to find that among these numerous fossil remains of beings which have lived there should be known to us some whose analogues still exist, from a germ to a vast multitude of living forms, of different and ascending grades of perfection, ending in man.

"This fact, as our collection of fossils proves, should lead us to suppose that the fossil remains of the animals whose living analogues we know are the less ancient fossils. The species to which each of them belongs had doubtless not yet time to vary in any of its forms.

"We should, then, never expect to find among the living species the totality of those that we meet with in the fossil state, and yet we cannot conclude that any species can really be lost or extinct. It is undoubtedly possible that among the largest animals some species have been destroyed as a result of the multiplication of man in the regions where they live. But this conjecture cannot be based on the consideration of fossils alone; we can only form an opinion in this respect when all the inhabited parts of the globe will have become perfectly known."

Lamarck did not have, as we now have, a knowledge of the geological succession of organic forms. The comparatively full and detailed view which we possess of the different vast assemblages of plant and animal life which have successively peopled the surface of our earth is a vision on which his eyes never rested. His slight, piecemeal glimpse of the animal life of the Paris Basin, and of the few other extinct forms then known, was all he had to depend upon or reason from. He was not disposed to believe that the thread of life once begun in the earliest times could be arbitrarily broken by catastrophic means; that there was no relation whatever between the earlier and later faunas. He utterly opposed Cuvier's view that species once formed could ever be lost or become extinct without ancestors or descendants. He on the contrary believed that species underwent a slow modification, and that the fossil forms are the ancestors of the animals now living. Moreover, Lamarck was the inventor of the first genealogical tree; his phylogeny, in the second volume of his _Philosophie zoologique_ (p. 463), proves that he realized that the forms leading up to the existing ones were practically extinct, as we now use the word. Lamarck in theory was throughout, as Houssay well says, at one with us who are now living, but a century behind us in knowledge of the facts needed to support his theory.

In this first published expression of his views on palæontology, we find the following truths enumerated on which the science is based: (1) The great length of geological time; (2) The continuous existence of animal life all through the different geological periods without sudden total extinctions and as sudden recreations of new assemblages; (3) The physical environment remaining practically the same throughout in general, but with (4) continual gradual but not catastrophic changes in the relative distribution of land and sea and other modifications in the physical geography, changes which (5) caused corresponding changes in the habitat, and (6) consequently in the habits of the living beings; so that there has been all through geological history a slow modification of life-forms.

Thus Lamarck's idea of creation is _evolutional_ rather than _uniformitarian_. There was, from his point of view, not simply a uniform march along a dead level, but a progression, a change from the lower or generalized to the higher or specialized--an evolution or unfolding of organic life. In his effort to disprove catastrophism he failed to clearly see that species, as we style them, became extinct, though really the changes in the species practically amounted to extinctions of the earlier species as such. The little that was known to Lamarck at the time he wrote, prevented his knowing that species became extinct, as we say, or recognizing the fact that while some species, genera, and even orders may rise, culminate, and die, others are modified, while a few persist from one period to another. He did, however, see clearly that, taking plant and animal life as a whole, it underwent a slow modification, the later forms being the descendants of the earlier; and this truth is the central one of modern palæontology.

Lamarck's first memoir on fossil shells, in which he described many new species, was published in 1802, after the appearance of his _Hydrogéologie_, to which he refers. It was the first of a series of descriptive papers, which appeared at intervals from 1802 to 1806. He does not fail to open the series of memoirs with some general remarks, which prove his broad, philosophic spirit, that characterizing the founder of a new science. He begins by saying that the fossil forms have their analogues in the tropical seas. He claims that there was evident proof that these molluscs could not have lived in a climate like that of places in which they now occur, instancing _Nautilius pompilius_, which now lives in the seas of warm countries; also the presence of exotic ferns, palms, fossil amber, fossil gum elastic, besides the occurrence of fossil crocodiles and elephants both in France and Germany.[83]

Hence there have been changes of climate since these forms flourished, and, he adds, the intervals between these changes of climate were stationary periods, whose duration was practically without limit. He assigns a duration to these stationary or intermediate periods of from three to five million years each--"a duration infinitely small relative to those required for all the changes of the earth's surface."

He refers in an appreciative way to the first special treatise on fossil shells ever published, that of an Englishman named Brander,[84] who collected the shells "out of the cliffs by the sea-coast between Christ Church and Lymington, but more especially about the cliffs by the village of Hordwell," where the strata are filled with these fossils. Lamarck, working upon collections of tertiary shells from Grignon and also from Courtagnon near Reims, with the aid of Brander's work showed that these beds, not known to be Eocene, extended into Hampshire, England; thus being the first to correlate by their fossils, though in a limited way to be sure, the tertiary beds of France with those of England.

How he at a later period (1805) regarded fossils and their relations to geology may be seen in his later memoirs, _Sur les Fossiles des environs de Paris_.[85]

"The determination of the characters, both generic and specific, of animals of which we find the fossil remains in almost all the dry parts of the continents and large islands of our globe will be, from several points of view, a thing extremely useful to the progress of natural history. At the outset, the more this determination is advanced, the more will it tend to complete our knowledge in regard to the species which exist in nature and of those which have existed, as it is true that some of them have been lost, as we have reason to believe, at least as concerns the large animals. Moreover, this same determination will be singularly advantageous for the advancement of geology; for the fossil remains in question may be considered, from their nature, their condition, and their situation, as authentic monuments of the revolutions which the surface of our globe has undergone, and they can throw a strong light on the nature and character of these revolutions."

This series of papers on the fossils of the Paris tertiary basin extended through the first eight volumes of the _Annales_, and were gathered into a volume published in 1806. In his descriptions his work was comparative, the fossil species being compared with their living representatives. The thirty plates, containing 483 figures representing 184 species (exclusive of those figured by Brard), were afterwards published, with the explanations, but not the descriptions, as a separate volume in 1823.[86] This (the text published in 1806) is the first truly scientific palæontological work ever published, preceding Cuvier's _Ossemens fossiles_ by six years.

When we consider Lamarck's--at his time unrivalled--knowledge of molluscs, his philosophical treatment of the relations of the study of fossils to geology, his correlation of the tertiary beds of England with those of France, and his comparative descriptions of the fossil forms represented by the existing shells, it seems not unreasonable to regard him as the founder of invertebrate palæontology, as Cuvier was of vertebrate or mammalian palæontology.

We have entered the claim that Lamarck was one of the chief founders of palæontology, and the first French author of a genuine, detailed palæontological treatise. It must be admitted, therefore, that the statement generally made that Cuvier was the founder of this science should be somewhat modified, though he may be regarded as the chief founder of vertebrate palæontology.

In this field, however, Cuvier had his precursors not only in Germany and Holland, but also in France.

Our information as to the history of the rise of vertebrate palæontology is taken from Blainville's posthumous work entitled _Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire_.[87] In this work, a severe critical and perhaps not always sufficiently appreciative account of Cuvier's character and work, we find an excellent history of the first beginnings of vertebrate palæontology. Blainville has little or nothing to say of the first steps in invertebrate palæontology, and, singularly enough, not a word of Lamarck's principles and of his papers and works on fossil shells--a rather strange oversight, because he was a friend and admirer of Lamarck, and succeeded him in one of the two departments of invertebrates created at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle after Lamarck's death.

Blainville, who by the way was the first to propose the word _palæontology_, shows that the study of the great extinct mammals had for forty years been held in great esteem in Germany, before Faujas and Cuvier took up the subject in France. Two Frenchmen, also before 1789, had examined mammalian bones. Thus Bernard de Jussieu knew of the existence in a fossil state of the teeth of the hippopotamus. Guettard[88] published in 1760 a memoir on the fossil bones of Aix en Provence. Lamanon (1780-1783)[89] in a beautiful memoir described a head, almost entire, found in the gypsum beds of Paris. Daubenton had also slightly anticipated Cuvier's law of correlation, giving "a very remarkable example of the mode of procedure to follow in order to solve these kinds of questions by the way in which he had recognized a bone of a giraffe whose skeleton he did not possess" (De Blainville).

"But it was especially in Germany, in the hands of Pallas, Camper, Blumenbach, anatomists and physicians, also those of Walch, Merck, Hollmann, Esper, Rosenmüller, and Collini (who was not, however, occupied with natural history), of Beckman, who had even discussed the subject in a general way (_De reductione rerum fossilium ad genera naturalia prototyporum--Nov. Comm. Soc. Scient. Goettingensis_, t. ii.), that palæontology applied to quadrupeds had already settled all that pertained to the largest species."

As early as 1764, Hollmann[90] had admirably identified the bones of a rhinoceros found in a bone-deposit of the Hartz, although he had no skeleton of this animal for comparison.

Pallas, in a series of memoirs dating from 1773, had discovered and distinguished the species of Siberian elephant or mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the large species of oxen and buffalo whose bones were found in such abundance in the quaternary deposits of Siberia; and, as Blainville says, if he did not distinguish the species, it was because at this epoch the question of the distinction of the two species of rhinoceros and of elephants, in the absence of material, could not be solved. This solution, however, was made by the Dutch anatomist Camper, in 1777, who had brought together at Amsterdam a collection of skeletons and skulls of the existing species which enabled him for the first time to make the necessary comparisons between the extinct and living species. A few years later (1780) Blumenbach confirmed Camper's identification, and gave the name of _Elephas primigenius_ to the Siberian mammoth.

"Beckman" [says Blainville] "as early as 1772 had even published a very good memoir on the way in which we should consider fossil organic bodies; he was also the first to propose using the name _fossilia_ instead of _petrefacta_, and to name the science which studies fossils _Oryctology_. It was also he who admitted that these bodies should be studied with reference to the class, order, genus, species, as we would do with a living being, and he compared them, which he called _prototypes_,[91] with their analogues. He then passes in review, following the zoölogical order, the fossils which had been discovered by naturalists. He even described one of them as a new species, besides citing, with an erudition then rare, all the authors and all the works where they were described. He did no more than to indicate but not name each species. Thus he was the means of soon producing a number of German authors who made little advance from lack of anatomical knowledge; but afterwards the task fell into the hands of men capable of giving to the newly created palæontology a remarkable impulse, and one which since then has not abated."

Blumenbach,[92] the most eminent and all-round German anatomist and physiologist of his time, one of the founders of anthropology as well as of palæontology, had meanwhile established the fact that there were two species of fossil cave-bear, which he named _Ursus spelæus_ and _U. arctoideus_. He began to publish his _Archæologia telluris_,[93] the first part of which appeared in 1803.

From Blainville's useful summary we learn that Blumenbach, mainly limiting his work to the fossils of Hanover, aimed at studying fossils in order to explain the revolutions of the earth.

"Hence the order he proposed to follow was not that commonly followed in treatises on oryctology, namely, systematic, following the classes and the orders of the animal and vegetable kingdom, but in a chronological order, in such a way as to show that the classes, so far as it was possible to conjecture with any probability, were established after or in consequence of the different revolutions of the earth.

"Thus, as we see, all the great questions, more or less insoluble, which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and even discussed by the celebrated professor of Göttingen as early as 1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays of M. G. Cuvier; the errors of distribution in the classes committed by Blumenbach were due to the backward state of geology."

The political troubles of Germany, which also bore heavily upon the University of Göttingen, probably brought Blumenbach's labors to an end, for after a second "specimen" of his work, of less importance than the first, the _Archæologia telluris_ was discontinued.

The French geologist Faujas,[94] who also published several articles on fossil animals, ceased his labors, and now Cuvier began his memorable work.

The field of the labors and triumphs of palæontology were now transferred to France. We have seen that the year 1793, when Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were appointed to fill the new zoölogical chairs, and the latter had in 1795 called Cuvier from Normandy to Paris, was a time of renascence of the natural sciences in France. Cuvier began a course of lectures on comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History. He was more familiar than any one else in France with the progress in natural science in Germany, and had felt the stimulus arising from this source; besides, as Blainville stated, he was also impelled by the questions boldly raised by Faujas in his geological lectures, who was somewhat of the school of Buffon. Cuvier, moreover, had at his disposition the collection of skeletons of the Museum, which was frequently increased by those of the animals which died in the menagerie. With his knowledge of comparative anatomy, of which, after Vicq-d'Azyr, he was the chief founder, and with the gypsum quarry of Montmartre, that rich cemetery of tertiary mammals, to draw from, he had the whole field before him, and rapidly built up his own vast reputation and thus added to the glory of France.

His first contribution to palæontology[95] appeared in 1798, in which he announced his intention of publishing an extended work on fossil bones of quadrupeds, to restore the skeletons and to compare them with those now living, and to determine their relations and differences; but, says Blainville, in the list of thirty or forty species which he enumerates in his tableau, none was apparently discovered by him, unless it was the species of "dog" of Montmartre, which he afterward referred to his new genera Palæotherium and Anaplotherium. In 1801 (le 26 brumaire, an IX.) he published, by order of the Institut, the programme of a work on fossil quadrupeds, with an increased number of species; but, as Blainville states, "It was not until 1804, and in tome iii. of the _Annales du Muséum_, namely, more than three years after his programme, that he began his publications by fragments and without any order, while these publications lasted more than eight years before they were collected into a general work"; this "_corps d'ouvrage_" being the _Ossemens fossiles_, which was issued in 1812 in four quarto volumes, with an atlas of plates.

It is with much interest, then, that we turn to Cuvier's great work, which brought him such immediate and widespread fame, in order to see how he treated his subject. His general views are contained in the preliminary remarks in his well-known "Essay on the Theory of the Earth" (1812), which was followed in 1821 by his _Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe_.

It was written in a more attractive and vigorous style than the writings of Lamarck, more elegant, concise, and with less repetition, but it is destitute of the philosophic grasp, and is not the work of a profound thinker, but rather of a man of talent who was an industrious collector and accurate describer of fossil bones, of a high order to be sure, but analytical rather than synthetical, of one knowing well the value of carefully ascertained and demonstrated facts, but too cautious, if he was by nature able to do so, to speculate on what may have seemed to him too few facts. It is also the work of one who fell in with the current views of the time as to the general bearing of his discoveries on philosophy and theology, believing as he did in the universality of the Noachian deluge.

Like Lamarck, Cuvier independently made use of the comparative method, the foundation method in palæontology; and Cuvier's well-known "law of correlation of structures," so well exemplified in the vertebrates, was a fresh, new contribution to philosophical biology.

In his _Discours_, speaking of the difficulty of determining the bones of fossil quadrupeds, as compared with fossil shells or the remains of fishes, he remarks:[96]

"Happily comparative anatomy possessed a principle which, well developed, was capable of overcoming every difficulty; it was that of the correlation of forms in organic beings, by means of which each kind of organism can with exactitude be recognized by every fragment of each of its parts.--Every organized being," he adds, "forms an entire system, unique and closed, whose organs mutually correspond, and concur in the same definite action by a reciprocal reaction. Hence none of these parts can change without the other being also modified, and consequently each of them, taken separately, indicates and produces (_donne_) all the others.

"A claw, a shoulder-blade, a condyle, a leg or arm-bone, or any other bone separately considered, enables us to discover the kind of teeth to which they have belonged; so also reciprocally we may determine the form of the other bones from the teeth. Thus, commencing our investigation by a careful survey of any one bone by itself, a person who is sufficiently master of the laws of organic structure can reconstruct the entire animal. The smallest facet of bone, the smallest apophysis, has a determinate character, relative to the class, the order, the genus, and the species to which it belongs, so that even when one has only the extremity of a well-preserved bone, he can, with careful examination, assisted by analogy and exact comparison, determine all these things as surely as if he had before him the entire animal."

Cuvier adds that he has enjoyed every kind of advantage for such investigations owing to his fortunate situation in the Museum of Natural History, and that by assiduous researches for nearly thirty years[97] he has collected skeletons of all the genera and sub-genera of quadrupeds, with those of many species in certain genera, and several individuals of certain species. With such means it was easy for him to multiply his comparisons, and to verify in all their details the applications of his laws.

Such is the famous law of correlation of parts, of Cuvier. It could be easily understood by the layman, and its enunciation added vastly to the popular reputation and prestige of the young science of comparative anatomy.[98] In his time, and applied to the forms occurring in the Paris Basin, it was a most valuable, ingenious, and yet obvious method, and even now is the principal rule the palæontologist follows in identifying fragments of fossils of any class. But it has its limitations, and it goes without saying that the more complete the fossil skeleton of a vertebrate, or the remains of an arthropod, the more complete will be our conception of the form of the extinct organism. It may be misleading in the numerous cases of convergence and of generalized forms which now abound in our palæontological collections. We can well understand how guarded one must be in working out the restorations of dinosaurs and fossil birds, of the Permian and Triassic theromorphs, and the Tertiary creodonts as compared with existing carnivora.

As the late O. C. Marsh[99] observed:

"We know to-day that unknown extinct animals cannot be restored from a single tooth or claw unless they are very similar to forms already known. Had Cuvier himself applied his methods to many forms from the early tertiary or older formations he would have failed. If, for instance, he had had before him the disconnected fragments of an eocene tillodont he would undoubtedly have referred a molar tooth to one of his pachyderms, an incisor tooth to a rodent, and a claw bone to a carnivore. The tooth of a Hesperornis would have given him no possible hint of the rest of the skeleton, nor its swimming feet the slightest clue to the ostrich-like sternum or skull. And yet the earnest belief in his own methods led Cuvier to some of his most important discoveries."

Let us now examine from Cuvier's own words in his _Discours_, not relying on the statements of his expositors or followers, just what he taught notwithstanding the clear utterances of his older colleague, Lamarck, whose views he set aside and either ignored or ridiculed.[100]

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He at the outset affirms that nature has, like mankind, also had her intestine wars, and that "the surface of the globe has been much convulsed by successive revolutions and various catastrophes."

As first proof of the revolutions on the surface of the earth he instances fossil shells, which in the lowest and most level parts of the earth are "almost everywhere in such a perfect state of preservation that even the smallest of them retain their most delicate parts, their sharpest ridges, and their finest and tenderest processes."

"We are therefore forcibly led to believe not only that the sea has at one period or another covered all our plains, but that it must have remained there for a long time and in a state of tranquillity, which circumstance was necessary for the formation of deposits so extensive, so thick, in part so solid, and filled with the exuviæ of aquatic animals."

But the traces of revolutions become still more marked when we ascend a little higher and approach nearer to the foot of the great mountain chains. Hence the strata are variously inclined, and at times vertical, contain shells differing specifically from those of beds on the plains below, and are covered by horizontal later beds. Thus the sea, previous to the formation of the horizontal strata, had formed others, which by some means have been broken, lifted up, and overturned in a thousand ways. There had therefore been also at least one change in the basin of that sea which preceded ours; it had also experienced at least one revolution.

He then gives proofs that such revolutions have been numerous.

"Thus the great catastrophes which have produced revolutions in the basins of the sea were preceded, accompanied, and followed by changes in the nature of the fluid and of the substances which it held in solution, and when the surface of the seas came to be divided by islands and projecting ridges, different changes took place in every separate basin."

We now come to the Cuvierian doctrine _par excellence_, one in which he radically differs from Lamarck's views as to the genetic relations between the organisms of successive strata.

"Amid these changes of the general fluid it must have been almost impossible for the same kind of animals to continue to live, nor did they do so in fact. Their species, and even their genera, change with the strata, and although the same species occasionally recur at small distances, it is generally the case that the shells of the ancient strata have forms peculiar to themselves; that they gradually disappear till they are not to be seen at all in the recent strata, still less in the existing seas, in which, indeed, we never discover their corresponding species, and where several even of their genera are not to be found; that, on the contrary, the shells of the recent strata resemble, as regards the genus, those which still exist in the sea, and that in the last formed and loosest of these strata there are some species which the eye of the most expert naturalists cannot distinguish from those which at present inhabit the ocean.

"In animal nature, therefore, there has been a succession of changes corresponding to those which have taken place in the chemical nature of the fluid; and when the sea last receded from our continent its inhabitants were not very different from those which it still continues to support."

He then refers to successive irruptions and retreats of the sea, "the final result of which, however, has been a universal depression of the level of the sea."

"These repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither been slow nor gradual; most of the catastrophes which have occasioned them have been sudden."

He then adds his proofs of the occurrence of revolutions before the existence of living beings. Like Lamarck, Cuvier was a Wernerian, and in speaking of the older or primitive crystalline rocks which contain no vestige of fossils, he accepted the view of the German theorist in geology, that granites forming the axis of mountain chains were formed in a fluid.

We must give Cuvier the credit of fully appreciating the value of fossils as being what he calls "historical documents," also for appreciating the fact that there were a number of revolutions marking either the incoming or end of a geological period; but as he failed to perceive the unity of organization in organic beings, and their genetic relationship, as had been indicated by Lamarck and by Geoffroy St. Hilaire, so in geological history he did not grasp, as did Lamarck, the vast extent of geological time, and the general uninterrupted continuity of geological events. He was analytic, thoroughly believing in the importance of confining himself to the discovery of facts, and, considering the multitude of fantastic hypotheses and suggestions of previous writers of the eighteenth century, this was sound, sensible, and thoroughly scientific. But unfortunately he did not stop here. Master of facts concerning the fossil mammals of the Paris Basin, he also--usually cautious and always a shrewd man of the world--fell into the error of writing his "theory of the world," and of going to the extreme length of imagining universal catastrophes where there are but local ones, a universal Noachian deluge when there was none, and of assuming that there were at successive periods thoroughgoing total and sudden extinctions of life, and as sudden recreations. Cuvier was a natural leader of men, a ready debater, and a clear, forcible writer, a man of great executive force, but lacking in insight and imagination; he dominated scientific Paris and France, he was the law-giver and autocrat of the laboratories of Paris, and the views of quiet, thoughtful, profound scholars such as Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire were disdainfully pushed aside, overborne, and the progress of geological thought was arrested, while, owing to his great prestige, the rising views of the Lamarckian school were nipped in the bud. Every one, after the appearance of Cuvier's great work on fossil mammals and of his _Règne Animal_, was a Cuvierian, and down to the time of Lyell and of Charles Darwin all naturalists, with only here and there an exception, were pronounced Cuvierians in biology and geology--catastrophists rather than uniformitarians. We now, with the increase of knowledge of physical and historical geology, of the succession of life on the earth, of the unity of organization pervading that life from monad to man all through the ages from the Precambrian to the present age, know that there were vast periods of preparation followed by crises, perhaps geologically brief, when there were widespread changes in physical geography, which reacted on the life-forms, rendering certain ones extinct, and modifying others; but this conception is entirely distinct from the views of Cuvier and his school,[101] which may, in the light of our present knowledge, properly be deemed not only totally inadequate, but childish and fantastic.

Cuvier cites the view of Dolomieu, the well-known geologist and mineralogist (1770-1801), only, however, to reject it, who went to the extent of supposing that "tides of seven or eight hundred fathoms have carried off from time to time the bottom of the ocean, throwing it up in mountains and hills on the primitive valleys and plains of the continents" (Dolomieu in _Journal de Physique_).

Cuvier met with objections to his extreme views. In his discourse he thus endeavors to answer "the following objection" which "has already been stated against my conclusions":

"Why may not the non-existing races of mammiferous land quadrupeds be mere modifications or varieties of those ancient races which we now find in the fossil state, which modifications may have been produced by change of climate and other local circumstances, and since raised to the present excessive differences by the operation of similar causes during a long succession of ages?

"This objection may appear strong to those who believe in the indefinite possibility of change of forms in organized bodies, and think that during a succession of ages, and by alternations of habits, all the species may change into each other, or one of them give birth to all the rest. Yet to these persons the following answer may be given from their own system: If the species have changed by degrees, as they assume, we ought to find traces of this gradual modification. Thus, between the Palæotherium and the species of our own days, we should be able to discover some intermediate forms; and yet no such discovery has ever been made. Since the bowels of the earth have not preserved monuments of this strange genealogy, we have a right to conclude that the ancient and now extinct species were as permanent in their forms and characters as those which exist at present; or, at least, that the catastrophe which destroyed them did not have sufficient time for the production of the changes that are alleged to have taken place."

Cuvier thus emphatically rejects all idea that any of the tertiary mammals could have been the ancestral forms of those now existing.

"From all these well-established facts, there does not seem to be the smallest foundation for supposing that the new genera which I have discovered or established among extraneous fossils, such as the _palæotherium_, _anaplotherium_, _megalonynx_, _mastodon_, _pterodactylis_, etc., have ever been the sources of any of our present animals, which only differ as far as they are influenced by time or climate. Even if it should prove true, which I am far from believing to be the case, that the fossil elephants, rhinoceroses, elks, and bears do not differ further from the present existing species of the same genera than the present races of dogs differ among themselves, this would by no means be a sufficient reason to conclude that they were of the same species; since the races or varieties of dogs have been influenced by the trammels of domestication, which these other animals never did and indeed never could experience."[102]

The extreme views of Cuvier as to the frequent renewal and extinction of life were afterward (in 1850) carried out to an exaggerated extent by D'Orbigny, who maintained that the life of the earth must have become extinct and again renewed twenty-seven times. Similar views were held by Agassiz, who, however, maintained the geological succession of animals and the parallelism between their embryonic development and geological succession, the two foundation stones of the biogenetic law of Haeckel. But immediately after the publication of Cuvier's _Ossemens fossiles_, as early as 1813, Von Schlotheim, the founder of vegetable palæontology, refused to admit that each set of beds was the result of such a thoroughgoing revolution.[103]

At a later date Bronn "demonstrated that certain species indeed really passed from one formation to another, and though stratigraphic boundaries are often barriers confining the persistence of some form, still this is not an absolute rule, since the species in nowise appear in their entirety."[104] At present the persistence of genera like Saccamina, Lingula, Ceratodus, etc., from one age to another, or even through two or more geological ages, is well known, while _Atrypa reticulatus_, a species of world-wide distribution, lived from near the beginning of the Upper Silurian to the Waverly or beginning of the Carboniferous age.

Such were the views of the distinguished founder of vertebrate palæontology. When we compare the _Hydrogéologie_ of Lamarck with Cuvier's _Discours_, we see, though some erroneous views, some very fantastic conceptions are held, in common with others of his time, in regard to changes of level of the land and the origin of the crystalline rocks, that it did contain the principles upon which modern palæontology is founded, while those of Cuvier are now in the limbo--so densely populated--of exploded, ill-founded theories.

Our claim that Lamarck should share with Cuvier the honor of being a founder of palæontology[105] is substantiated by the philosophic Lyell, who as early as 1836, in his _Principles of Geology_, expresses the same view in the following words: "The labors of Cuvier in comparative osteology, and of Lamarck in recent and fossil shells, had raised these departments of study to a rank of which they had never previously been deemed susceptible."

Our distinguished American palæontologist, the late O. C. Marsh, takes the same view, and draws the following parallel between the two great French naturalists:

"In looking back from this point of view, the philosophical breadth of Lamarck's conclusions, in comparison with those of Cuvier, is clearly evident. The invertebrates on which Lamarck worked offered less striking evidence of change than the various animals investigated by Cuvier; yet they led Lamarck directly to evolution, while Cuvier ignored what was before him on this point, and rejected the proof offered by others. Both pursued the same methods, and had an abundance of material on which to work, yet the facts observed induced Cuvier to believe in catastrophes, and Lamarck in the uniform course of nature. Cuvier declared species to be permanent; Lamarck, that they were descended from others. Both men stand in the first rank in science; but Lamarck was the prophetic genius, half a century in advance of his time."[106]

FOOTNOTES:

[81] Although Defrance (born 1759, died in 1850) aided Lamarck in collecting tertiary shells, his earliest palæontological paper (on Hipponyx) did not appear until the year 1819.

[82] In a footnote Lamarck refers to an unpublished work, which probably formed a part of the _Hydrogéologie_, published in the following year. "_Voyez à ce sujet mon ouvrage intitulé: De l'influence du mouvement des eaus sur la surface du globe terrestre, et des indices du déplacement continuel du bassin des mers, ainsi que de son transport successif sur les différens points de la surface du globe_" (no date).

[83] It should be stated that the first observer to inaugurate the comparative method was that remarkable forerunner of modern palæontologists, Steno the Dane, who was for a while a professor at Padua. In 1669, in his treatise entitled _De Solido intra Solidum naturaliter contento_, which Lyell translates "On gems, crystals, and organic petrefactions inclosed within solid rocks," he showed, by dissecting a shark from the Mediterranean, that certain fossil teeth found in Tuscany were also those of some shark. "He had also compared the shells discovered in the Italian strata with living species, pointed out their resemblance, and traced the various gradations from shells merely calcined, or which had only lost their animal gluten, to those petrefactions in which there was a perfect substitution of stony matter" (Lyell's _Principles_, p. 25). About twenty years afterwards, the English philosopher Robert Hooke, in a discourse on earthquakes, written in 1688, but published posthumously in 1705, was aware that the fossil ammonites, nautili, and many other shells and fossil skeletons found in England, were of different species from any then known; but he doubted whether the species had become extinct, observing that the knowledge of naturalists of all the marine species, especially those inhabiting the deep sea, was very deficient. In some parts of his writings, however, he leans to the opinion that species had been lost. Some species, he observes with great sagacity, "are _peculiar to certain places_, and not to be found elsewhere." Turtles and such large ammonites as are found in Portland seem to have been the productions of hotter countries, and he thought that England once lay under the sea within the torrid zone (Lyell's _Principles_).

Gesner the botanist, of Zurich, also published in 1758 an excellent treatise on petrefactions and the changes of the earth which they testify. He observed that some fossils, "such as ammonites, gryphites, belemnites, and other shells, are either of unknown species or found only in the Indian and other distant seas" (Lyell's _Principles_).

Geikie estimates very highly Guettard's labors in palæontology, saying that "his descriptions and excellent drawings entitle him to rank as the first great leader of the palæontological school of France." He published many long and elaborate memoirs containing brief descriptions, but without specific names, and figured some hundreds of fossil shells. He was the first to recognize trilobites (Illænus) in the Silurian slates of Angers, in a memoir published in 1762. Some of his generic names, says Geikie, "have passed into the languages of modern palæontology," and one of the genera of chalk sponges which he described has been named after him, _Guettardia_. In his memoir "On the accidents that have befallen fossil shells compared with those which are found to happen to shells now living in the sea" (Trans. Acad. Roy. Sciences, 1765, pp. 189, 329, 399) he shows that the beds of fossil shells on the land present the closest possible analogy to the flow of the present sea, so that it becomes impossible to doubt that the accidents, such as broken and worn shells, which have affected the fossil organisms, arose from precisely the same causes as those of exactly the same nature that still befall their successors on the existing ocean bottom. On the other hand, Geikie observes that it must be acknowledged "that Guettard does not seem to have had any clear ideas of the sequence of formations and of geological structures."

[84] Scheuchzer's "Complaint and Vindication of the Fishes" (_Piscium Querelae et Vindiciae_, Germany, 1708), "a work of zoölogical merit, in which he gave some good plates and descriptions of fossil fish" (Lyell). Gesner's treatise on petrefactions preceded Lamarck's work in this direction, as did Brander's _Fossillia Hantoniensia_, published in 1766, which contained "excellent figures of fossil shells from the more modern (or Eocene) marine strata of Hampshire. In his opinion fossil animals and testacea were, for the most part, of unknown species, and of such as were known the living analogues now belonged to southern latitudes" (Lyell's _Principles_, eighth edition, p. 46).

[85] _Annales du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle_, vi., 1805, pp. 222-228.

[86] _Recueil de Planches des Coquilles fossiles des environs de Paris_ (Paris, 1823). There are added two plates of fossil fresh-water shells (twenty-one species of Limnæa, etc.) by Brard, with sixty-two figures.

[87] _Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Biographies scientifiques_, par Ducrotay de Blainville (Paris, 1890, p. 446).

[88] "Mémoire sur des os fossiles découverts auprès de la ville d'Aix en Provence" (Mém. Acad. Sc., Paris, 1760, pp. 209-220).

[89] "Sur un os d'une grosseur énorme qu'on a trouvé dans une couche de glaise au milieu de Paris; et en général sur les ossemens fossiles qui ont appartenu à de grands animaux" (_Journal de Physique_, tome xvii., 1781. pp. 393-405). Lamanon also, in 1780, published in the same _Journal_ an article on the nature and position of the bones found at Aix en Provence; and in 1783 another article on the fossil bones belonging to gigantic animals.

[90] Hollmann had still earlier published a paper entitled _De corporum marinorum, aliorumque peregrinorum in terra continente origine_ (_Commentarii Soc. Goettingen._, tom. iii., 1753, pp. 285-374).

[91] _Novi Commentarii Soc. Sc. Goettingensis_, tom. ii., _Commentat._, tom. i.

[92] His first palæontological article appears to have been one entitled _Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Vorwelt_ (Lichtenberg, _Voigt's Magaz._, Bd. vi., S. 4, 1790, pp. 1-17). I have been unable to ascertain in which of his publications he describes and names the cave-bear.

[93] _Specimen archæologia telluris terrarumque imprimis Hannoveranæ_, pts. i., ii. _Cum 4 tabl. aen. 4 maj._ Gottingæ, 1803.

[94] Faujas Saint-Fond wrote articles on fossil bones (1794); on fossil plants both of France (1803) and of Monte Bolca (1820); on a fish from Nanterre (1802) and a fossil turtle (1803); on two species of fossil ox, whose skulls were found in Germany, France, and England (1803), and on an elephant's tusk found in the volcanic tufa of Darbres (1803); on the fossil shells of Mayence (1806); and on a new genus (_Clotho_) of bivalve shells.

[95] _Sur les ossemens qui se trouvent dans le gyps de Montmartre_ (_Bulletin des sciences pour la Société philomatique_, tomes 1, 2, 1798, pp. 154-155).

[96] The following account is translated from the fourth edition of the _Ossemens fossiles_, vol. 1., 1834, also the sixth edition of the _Discours_, separately published in 1830. It does not differ materially from the first edition of the _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_, translated by Jameson, and republished in New York, with additions by Samuel L. Mitchell, in 1818.

[97] In the first edition of the _Théorie_ he says fifteen years, writing in 1812. In the later edition he changed the number of years to thirty.

[98] De Blainville is inclined to make light of Cuvier's law and of his assumptions; and in his somewhat cynical, depreciatory way, says:

"Thus for the thirty years during which appeared the works of M. G. Cuvier on fossil bones, under the most favorable circumstances, in a kind of renascence of the science of organization of animals, then almost effaced in France, aided by the richest osteological collections which then existed in Europe, M. G. Cuvier passed an active and a comparatively long life, in a region abounding in fossil bones, without having established any other principle in osteology than a witticism which he had been unable for a moment to take seriously himself, because he had not yet investigated or sufficiently studied the science of organization, which I even doubt, to speak frankly, if he ever did. Otherwise, he would himself soon have perceived the falsity of his assertion that a single facet of a bone was sufficient to reconstruct a skeleton from the observation that everything is harmoniously correlated in an animal. It is a great thing if the memory, aided by a strong imagination, can thus pass from a bone to the entire skeleton, even in an animal well known and studied even to satiety; but for an unknown animal, there is no one except a man but slightly acquainted with the anatomy of animals who could pretend to do it. It is not true anatomists like Hunter, Camper, Pallas, Vicq-d'Azyr, Blumenbach, Soemmering, and Meckel who would be so presuming, and M. G. Cuvier would have been himself much embarrassed if he had been taken at his word, and besides it is this assertion which will remain formulated in the mouths of the ignorant, and which has already made many persons believe that it is possible to answer the most difficult and often insoluble problems in palæontology, without having made any preliminary study, with the aid of dividers, and, on the other hand, discouraging the Blumenbachs and Soemmerings from giving their attention to this kind of work."

Huxley has, _inter alia_, put the case in a somewhat similar way, to show that the law should at least be applied with much caution to unknown forms:

"Cuvier, in the _Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe_, strangely credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others, with the invention of a new method of palæontological research. But if you will turn to the _Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles_, and watch Cuvier not speculating, but working, you will find that his method is neither more nor less than that of Steno. If he was able to make his famous prophecy from the jaw which lay upon the surface of a block of stone to the pelvis which lay hidden in it, it was not because either he or any one else knew, or knows, why a certain form of jaw is, as a rule, constantly accompanied by the presence of marsupial bones, but simply because experience has shown that these two structures are coördinated" (_Science and Hebrew Tradition. Rise and Progress of Paleontology_ 1881, p. 23).

[99] _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_ (1879).

[100] The following statement of Cuvier's views is taken from Jameson's translation of the first _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_, "which formed the introduction to his _Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles_," the first edition of which appeared in 1812, or ten years after the publication of the _Hydrogéologie_. The original I have not seen, but I have compared Jameson's translation with the sixth edition of the _Discours_ (1820).

[101] Cuvier, in speaking of these revolutions, "which have changed the surface of our earth," correctly reasons that they must have excited a more powerful action upon terrestrial quadrupeds than upon marine animals. "As these revolutions," he says, "have consisted chiefly in changes of the bed of the sea, and as the waters must have destroyed all the quadrupeds which they reached if their irruption over the land was general, they must have destroyed the entire class, or, if confined only to certain continents at one time, they must have destroyed at least all the species inhabiting these continents, without having the same effect upon the marine animals. On the other hand, millions of aquatic animals may have been left quite dry, or buried in newly formed strata or thrown violently on the coasts, while their races may have been still preserved in more peaceful parts of the sea, whence they might again propagate and spread after the agitation of the water had ceased."

[102] _Discours_, etc. Sixth edition.

[103] Felix Bernard, _The Principles of Paleontology_, Paris, 1895, translated by C. E. Brooks, edited by J. M. Clark, from 14th Annual Report New York State Geologist, 1895, pp. 127-217 (p. 16). Bernard gives no reference to the work in which Schlotheim expressed this opinion. E. v. Schlotheim's first work, _Flora der Vorwelt_, appeared in 1804, entitled _Beschreibung merkwürdiger Kraüterabdrücke und Pflanzenversteinerungen. Ein Beytrag zur Flora der Vorvelt._ I Abtheil. Mit 14 Kpfrn. 4^o. Gotha, 1804. A later work was _Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte der Versteinerungen in geognostischer Hinsicht_ (_Denkschrift d. k. Academie d. Wissenschaften zu München für den Jahren 1816 und 1817_. 8 Taf. München, 1819). He was followed in Germany by Sternberg (_Versuch einer geognostischbotanischen Darstellung der Flora der Vorvelt._ 1-8. 1811. Leipzig, 1820-38); and in France by A. T. Brongniart, 1801-1876 (_Histoire des Végétaux fossiles_, 1828). These were the pioneers in palæophytology.

[104] Bernard's _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_ (1879), p. 23.

[105] In his valuable and comprehensive _Geschichte der Geologie und Paläontologie_ (1899), Prof. K. von Zittel, while referring to Lamarck's works on the tertiary shells of Paris and his _Animaux sans Vertèbres_, also giving a just and full account of his life, practically gives him the credit of being one of the founders of invertebrate palæontology. He speaks of him as "the reformer and founder of scientific conchology," and states that "he defined with wonderful acuteness the numerous genera and species of invertebrate animals, and created thereby for the ten years following an authoritative foundation." Zittel, however, does not mention the _Hydrogéologie_. Probably so rare a book was overlooked by the eminent German palæontologist.

[106] _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_ (1879), p. 23.