WORK IN PALHZONTOLOGY 129 
mals whose living analogues we know are the less 
ancient fossils. The species to which each of them 
belongs had doubtless not yet time to vary in any of 
its forms. 
““We should, then, never expect to find among the 
living species the totality of those that we meet with 
in the fossil state, and yet we cannot conclude that 
any species can really be lost or extinct. It is un- 
doubtedly possible that among the largest animals 
some species have been destroyed asia fecult of the 
‘multiplication of man in the regions where they live. 
But this conjecture cannot be based on the consider- 
ation of fossils alone; we can only form an opinion in 
this respect when all the inhabited parts of the globe 
will have become perfectly known.” 
Lamarck did not have, as we now have, a knowledge 
of the geological succession of organic forms. The 
comparatively full and detailed view which we possess 
of the different vast assemblages of plant and animal 
life which have successively peopled the surface of 
our earth is a vision on which his eyes never rested. 
His slight, piecemeal glimpse of the animal life of the 
Paris Basin, and of the few other extinct forms then 
known, was all he had to depend upon or reason from. 
He was not disposed to believe that the thread of life 
once begun in the earliest times could be arbitrarily 
broken by catastrophic means; that there was no re- 
lation whatever between the earlier and later faunas. 
He utterly opposed Cuvier’s view that species once 
formed could ever be lost or become extinct without 
ancestors or descendants. He on the contrary be- 
lieved that species underwent a slow modification, and 
that the fossil forms are the ancestors of the animals 
now living. Moreover, Lamarck was the inventor of 
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