92 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
where they were then found; that the animals had 
given to the figured stones all their different shapes, 
and that he boldly defied all the school of Aristotle 
to attack his proofs.” * 
Then succeeded, at the end) of ‘the seventeenth 
century, the forerunners of modern geology: Steno 
(1669), Leibnitz (1683), Ray (1692), Woodward (1695), 
Vallisneri (1721), while Moro published his views in 
1745. In the eighteenth century Réaumur + (1720) 
presented a paper on the fossil shells of Touraine. 
Cuvier ¢ thus pays his respects, in at least an un- 
sympathetic way, to the geological essayists and 
compilers of the seventeenth century: 
“The end of the seventeenth century lived to,see 
the birth of a new science, which took, in its infancy, 
the high-sounding name of ‘Theory of the Earth.’ 
Starting from a small number of facts, badly observed, 
connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it pre- 
tended to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it 
were, play with them, and to create their history. 
Its arbitrary methods, its pompous language, alto- 
gether ‘seemed tomrender it foreion. to the “other 
sciences, and, indeed, the professional savants for a 
long time cast it out of the circle of their studies.” 
Their views, often premature, composed of half- 
truths, were mingled with glaring errors and fantastic 
misconceptions, but were none the less germinal. 
Leibnitz was the first to propose the nebular hypoth- 
esis, which was more fully elaborated by Kant and 
Laplace. Buffon, influenced by the writing of Leib- 
* Quoted from Flouren’s Eloge Historique de Georges Cuvier, 
Hoefer’s edition. Paris, 1854. 
+ Remargques sur les Coguilles fossiles de quelques Cantons de la 
Touraine. Mém. Acad. Sc. Paris, 1720, pp. 400-417. 
t Eloge Historique de Werner, p. 113. 
