LAMARCK’S WORK IN GEOLOGY 119 
a great part of its thickness and in the mountain 
masses—have they not had opportunities to convince 
themselves that the antiquity of this same globe is so 
great that it is absolutely beyond the power of man 
to appreciate it in an adequate way ! 
“ Assuredly our chronologies do not extend back 
very far, and they could only have been made by 
propping them up by fables. ‘Traditions, both oral 
and written, become necessarily lost, and it is in the 
nature of things that this should be so. 
“ Even if the invention of printing had been more 
ancient than it is, what would have resulted at the 
end of ten thousand years? Everything changes, 
everything becomes modified, everything becomes 
lost or destroyed. Every living language insensibly 
changes its idiom; at the end of a thousand years 
the writings made in any language can only be read 
with difficulty; after two thousand years none of 
these writings will be understood. Besides wars, 
vandalism, the greediness of tyrants and of those 
who guide religious opinions, who always rely on the 
ignorance of the human race and are supported by it, 
how many are the causes, as proved by history and the 
sciences, of epochs after epochs of revolutions, which 
have more or less completely destroyed them. 
““TfTow many are the causes by which man loses all 
trace of that which has existed, and cannot believe 
nor even conceive of the immense antiquity of the 
earth he inhabits! 
“How great will yet seem this antiquity of the 
terrestrial globe in the eyes of man when he shall 
D> 
form a just idea of the origin of living bodies, as also 
of the causes of the development and of the gradual 
process of perfection of the organization of these 
bodies, and especially when it will be conceived that, 
time and favorable circumstances having been neces- 
sary to give existence to all the living species such as 
we actually see, he is himself the last result and the 
