108 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
and with wonderful prevision, considering the time he 
wrote and the limited observations he could make, 
claimed that it is not the sea which has risen or fallen, 
but the land itself which is sometimes raised up and 
sometimes depressed, while the sea-bottom may also 
be elevated or sunk down. He refers to such facts 
as deluges, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and 
sudden swellings of the land beneath the sea. 
“And it is not merely the small, but the large 
islands also, not merely the islands, but the conti- 
nents which can be lifted up together with the sea; 
and, too, the large and small tracts may subside, for 
habitations and cities, like Bure, Bizona, and many 
others, have been engulfed by earthquakes.” * 
But it was not until eighteen centuries later that 
this doctrine, under the teachings of Playfair, Leo- 
pold von Buch, and Elie de Beaumont (1829-30) 
became generally accepted. In 1845 Humboldt re- 
marked, “It is a fact to-day recognized by all geolo- 
gists, that the rise of continents is due to an actual 
upheaval, and not to an apparent subsidence occa- 
sioned by a general depression of the level of the 
sea.’ (Cosmas, 1). Yet) as late as+ 1860 we have an 
essay by H. Trautschold ¢ in which is a statement 
of the arguments which can be brought forward in 
favor of the doctrine that the increase of the land 
above sea level is due to the retirement of the sea. 
x 
* Quoted from Lyell’s Principles of Geology, eighth edit., p. 17. 
+ Bulletin Société Imp. des Naturalistes de Moscou, xlii. (1869), 
pt. I, p. 4, quoted from Geikie’s Geology, p. 276, footnote. 
t Suess also, in his Antz, etc., substitutes for the folding of the 
earth’s crust by tangential pressure the subsidence by gravity of por- 
tions of the crust, their falling in obliging the sea to follow. Suess 
