WORK IN PALAONTOLOGY it 
tions of the earlier species as such. The little that 
was known to Lamarck at the time he wrote, pre- 
vented his knowing that species became extinct, as 
we say, or recognizing the fact that while some 
species, genera, and even orders may rise, culminate, 
and die, others are modified, while a few persist from 
one period to another. He did, however, see clearly 
that, taking plant and animal life as a whole, it under- 
went a slow modification, the later forms being the 
descendants of the earlier; and this truth is the central 
one of modern paleontology. 
Lamarck’s first memoir on fossil shells, in which he 
described many new species, was published in 1802, 
after the appearance of his Hydrogcologie, to which 
he refers. It was the first of aseries of descriptive 
papers, which appeared at intervals from 1802 to 
1806. He does not fail to open the series of memoirs 
with some general remarks, which prove his broad, 
philosophic spirit, that characterizing the founder of 
a new science. He begins by saying that the fossil 
forms have their analogues in the tropical seas. He 
claims that there was evident proof that these 
molluscs could not have lived in a climate like that 
of places in which they now occur, instancing Mawtz- 
linus pompilius, which now lives in the seas of warm 
countries; also the presence of exotic ferns, palms, 
fossil amber, fossil gum-elastic, besides the occurrence 
of fossil crocodiles and elephants both in France and 
Germany.* 
* It should be stated that the first observer to inaugurate the com- 
parative method was that remarkable forerunner of modern paleon- 
tologists, Steno the Dane, who was for a while a professor at Padua. 
