93 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
Ueber adie atissern Kennzetchen der Fossilien ap- 
peared in 1774; his Kurze Klassifikation und Be- 
schretbung der Gebtrgsarten in 1787. He discovered 
the law of the superposition of stratified rocks, 
though he wrongly considered volcanic rocks, such as 
basalt, to be of aqueous origin, being as he supposed 
formed of chemical precipitates from water. But he 
was the first to state that the age of different forma- 
tions can be told by their fossils, certain species 
being confined to particular beds, while others ranged 
throughout whole formations, and others seemed to 
occur in several different formations; “the original 
species found in these formations appearing to have 
been so constituted as to live through a variety of 
changes which had destroyed hundreds of other 
species which we find confined to particular beds.” * 
His views as regards fossils, as Jameson states, were 
probably not known to Cuvier, and it is more than 
doubtful whether Lamarck knew of them. He 
observed that fossils appear first in “ transition” or 
palaozoic strata, and were mainly corals and molluscs; 
that in the older carboniferous rocks the fossils are 
of higher types, such as fish and amphibious animals ; 
while in the tertiary or alluvial strata occur the re- 
mains of birds and quadrupeds. He thought that 
marine plants were more ancient than land plants. 
His studies led him to infer that the fossils con- 
tained in the oldest rocks are very different from any 
of the species of the present time; that the newer the 
formation, the more do the remains approach in form 
* Jameson's Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth, New York, 1818. 
