LAMARCK’S WORK IN GEOLOGY 109 
As authentic and unimpeachable proofs of the 
former existence of the sea where now it is absent, 
Lamarck cites the occurrence of fossils in rocks in- 
land. Lamarck’s first paper on fossils was read to 
the Institute in 1799, or about three years previous 
to the publication of the Hydrogcologie. Ue restricts 
the term “ fossils’ to vegetable and animal remains, 
since the word in his time was by some loosely ap- 
plied to minerals as well as fossils; to anything dug 
out of the earth. “We find fossils,” he says, ‘on 
dry land, even in the middle of continents and large 
islands; and not only in places far removed from the 
sea, but even on mountains and in their bowels, at 
considerable heights, each part of the earth’s surface 
having at some time been a veritable ocean bottom.” 
He then quotes at length accounts of such instances 
from Buffon, and notices their prodigious number, 
and that while the greater number are marine, others 
are fresh-water and terrestrial shells, and the marine 
shells may be divided into littoral and pelagic. 
‘This distinction is very important to make, be- 
cause the consideration of fossils is, as we have already 
said, one of the principal means of knowing well the 
revolutions which have taken place on the surface of 
our globe. This subject is of great importance, and 
under this point of view it should lead naturalists to 
study fossil shells, in order to compare them with 
their analogues which we can discover in the sea; 
finally, to carefully seek the places where each species 
also explains the later transgressions of the sea by the progressive ac- 
cumulation of sediments which raise the level of the sea by their de- 
position at its bottom. Thus he believes that the true factor in the 
deformation of the globe is vertical descent, and not, as Neumayr had 
previously thought, the folding of the crust. 
