Alcide cVOrhigny, 65 



liave to it its strongest impulsion." ^ It must be remembered also 

 that Agassiz in 1845 wrote a monograph in which he questioned 

 the conclusions of Philippi and his school, and reached others 

 which find a remarkable parallel in those of d'Orbigny. It is 

 here that we find the early history of the contest between the 

 Uniformitarian and the Catastrophal theories.'-^ It followed naturally 

 that d'Orbigny and his followers regarded the creation of man as 

 Catastrophal: "for his privileged creature God could arrest the 

 ordinary course of Nature." ^ To adopt the terminology of a more 

 recent date, d'Orbigny, Elie de Beaumont, and Gaudry (though to 

 a lesser degree) were whole-souled Vitalists. 



It follows from this that d'Orbigny attached the highest im- 

 portance to fossils as zone-determinants. As von Zittel points out : 

 " d'Orbigny thought it possible to base stratigraphy wholly upon 

 palieontological features, more especially upon the occurrence of 

 MoUusca, Echinodermata, and Coelenterata " * — he might have 

 added, and of Foraminifera. This makes its first appearance in the 

 Paris Chalk Memoir, where he lays down an axiom that found its 

 echo and reiteration in all his later works : — " The comparative 

 study of the fossil Foraminifera of all zones has proved to me 

 a fact of geological importance : it is that each zone has its cha-. 

 racteristic species, by which it may be recognized in whatever 

 circumstances that can occur ; and these little shells being in- 

 finitely more common than those of Mollusca, the application of 

 them which we can make is so much the more certain and be- 

 comes extremely interesting." ^ He elaborates this theory at great 

 length in the Vienna Memoir,^ in the " Prodrome," '^ and in the 

 " Dictionnaire Universelle." ^ The most direct contradiction of 

 the theory comes, as we might expect, from Carpenter, who, after 

 reviewing shortly the geological record, observes : — " No other 

 group aftbrds anything like the same evidence, on the one hand, 

 of the derivation of a multitude of distinguishable forms from 

 a few primitive types, and,' on the other, of the continuity of 



' Gaudry's views upon evolution were based upon an erroneous premise. He 

 argued that the Sponges and Foraminifera are the most elementary of the 

 Radiata, the Echinoderms the most developed, and that therefore the Echinoderms 

 must have developed later than the Sponges and the Foraminifera, and he states 

 the erroneous postulate that the Echinoderms are more numerous in the early 

 geological ages than the Sponges and Foraminifera (XVI., p. 839). This of course 

 is not the case. But, as Gaudry points out (p. 847), Palaeontology was at the time 

 when he wrote only a study of the last fifty years. 



- For a reasoned discussion of the principles involved see XXV., pp. 197, 379. 



^ XVI., pp. 838, 847. 



^ XXV., p. 507. Of. Gaudry writing in 1858, "The more d'Orbigny's ideas 

 gain ground, the more we shall believe that the fossils, strictly confined in 

 certain strata, serve as means of recognition not-only of the principal groups of 

 the periods, but also of their sub-divisions — and the more also will pala3ontology 

 gain in importance." 



•' X., p. 4. « XII., p. xxiii et seq. 



■ XV., pp. xxxix et seq. ** XIII., p. 670. 



