96 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
sea is the most potent destroyer of the land, and that 
the material thus removed is deposited either on the 
land or along the shores of the sea. Hethought that 
the levels of the valleys are at present being raised, 
owing to the deposit of detritus in them. He points 
out that the deposits laid down by the ocean do not 
extend far out to sea, “that consequently the eleva- 
tions of new mountains in the sea, by the deposition 
of sediment, is a process very difficult to conceive ; 
that the transport of the sediment as far as the equa- 
tor is not less improbable; and that still more diffi- 
cult to accept is the suggestion that the sediment 
from our continent is carried into the seas of the 
New World. In short, we are still very little ad- 
vanced towards the theory of the earth as it now 
exists.” Guettard was the first to discover the vol- 
canoes of Auvergne, but he was “ hopelessly wrong” 
in regard to the origin of basalt, forestalling Werner 
in his mistakes as to its aqueous origin. He was 
thus the first Neptunist, while, as Geikie states, his 
“observations in Auvergne practically started the 
Vulcanist camp.” 
We now come to Lamarck’s own time. He must 
have been familiar with the results of Pallas’s travels 
in Russia and Siberia (1793-94). The distinguished 
German zoélogist and geologist, besides working out 
the geology of the Ural Mountains, showed, in 1777, 
that there was a general law in the formation of all 
mountain chains composed chiefly of primary rocks; * 
the granitic axis being flanked by schists, and these 
* Lyell’s Principles of Geoloczy. 
P, or, 
