A 
LAMARCK’S WORK IN GEOLOGY 99 
to the organic beings of the present creation, and 
that in the very latest formations, fossil remains of 
species now existing occur. Such advanced views as 
these would seem to entitle Werner to rank as one of 
the founders of palaontology.* 
Hutton’s Theory of the Earth appeared in 1785, 
and in a more developed state, as a separate work, in 
1795.{ ‘‘ The ruins of an older world,” he said, “are 
visible in the present structure of our planet, and the 
strata which now compose our continents have been 
once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the 
waste of preéxisting continents. The same forces are 
still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechan- 
ical violence, even the hardest rocks, and transport- 
ing the materials to the sea, where they are spread 
out and form strata analogous to those of more 
ancient date. Although loosely deposited along the 
bottom of the ocean, they became afterwards altered 
and consolidated by volcanic heat, and were then 
heaved up, fractured, and contorted.” Again he said: 
‘In the economy of the world I can find no traces of 
a beginning, no prospect of an end.” As Lyell re- 
marks: “ Hutton imagined that the continents were 
first gradually destroyed by aqueous degradation, 
and when their ruins had furnished materials for new 
* J. G. Lehmann of Berlin, in 1756, first formally stated that there 
was some regular succession in the strata, his observations being 
based on profiles of the Hartz and the Erzgebirge. He proposed 
the names Zechstein, Kupferschiefer, rothes Todtliegendes, which 
still linger in German treatises. G. C. Fuchsel (1762) wrote on the 
stratigraphy of the coal measures, the Permian and the later systems 
in Thuringia. (Zittel.) 
+ James Hutton was born at Edinburgh, June 3, 1726, where he died 
March 26, 1797. 
