138 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
later (1780) Blumenbach confirmed Camper’s identifi- 
cation, and gave the name of Elephas primigenius to 
the Siberian mammoth. 
“Beckman” [says Blainville] ‘as early as 1772 had 
even published a very good memoir on the way in 
which we should consider fossil organic bodies; he 
was also the first to propose using the name /ossz/ia 
instead of fetrefacta, and to name the science which 
studies fossils Oryctology. It was also he who admit- 
ted that these bodies should be studied with reference 
to the class, order, genus, species, as we would do with 
a living being, and he compared them, which he called 
prototypes,* with their analogues. He then passes in 
review, following the zodlogical order, the fossils which 
had been discovered by naturalists. He even described 
one of them as a new species, besides citing, with an 
erudition then rare, all the authors and all the works 
where they were described. He did no more than to 
indicate but not name each species. Thus he was 
the means of soon producing a number of German 
authors who made little advance from lack of ana- 
tomical knowledge; but afterwards the task fell into 
the hands of men capable of giving to the newly 
created palaontology a remarkable impulse, and one 
which since then has not abated.” 
Blumenbach,t the most eminent and all-round Ger- 
man anatomist and physiologist of his time, one of 
the founders of anthropology as well as of palzontol- 
* Novi Commentarit Soc. Sc. Goettingensis, tom. ii., Commentat., 
tom. i. 
+ His first paleeontological article appears to have been one entitled 
Beitrége zur Naturgeschichte der Vorwelt (Lichtenberg, Voiy?t's 
Magaz., Bd. vi, S. 4, 1790, pp. I-17). I have been unable to ascer- 
tain in which of his publications he describes and names the cave- 
bear. : 
