Palaeontology. 165 



related to modern forms. By his reconstructive genius 

 and by his confident sometimes over-confident use of 

 the principle of correlation, he brought the dead to life 

 again, and insisted on their being ranked along with 

 the modern types in a unified zoological system. He 

 had clearly before him the central idea of palaeontology, 

 that of a succession of faunas upon the earth, and yet 

 he lost the chief virtue of the idea by refusing to admit 

 that the succession was genetic. It must be distinctly 

 remembered that Cuvier believed in successive cata- 

 clysms which destroyed the population of each epoch 

 and left the ground clear for a fresh creative act. Yet 

 in Buffon's Theorie de la Terre he might have found a 

 clear prevision of the anti-catastrophic or uniformitarian 

 theory. 



Lamarck may be called the founder of the palaeon- 

 tology of the Invertebrate animals, not that he de- 

 scribed even so large or so varied a collec- Lamarck 

 tion as many of his predecessors, but because (1744-1829). 

 he studied them thoughtfully, and used his results in 

 his pioneer work as an evolutionist. He studied in 

 particular the fossil Molluscs of the Paris basin, showing 

 that many were extinct, and that the different strata 

 contained distinctive forms. 



It seems, to say the least, doubtful whether the full 

 import of Cuvier's work would have been so soon 

 realized if there had not been the contem- wniiam 

 poraneous work of William Smith, who is Smith 

 often called "the father of English Geology". C^ 1 ^)- 

 Independently of Werner he established the conception 

 of a regular succession of strata in the earth's crust, 

 showed that the various strata were definable by the 

 fossils which they contained, and made the suggestive 

 observation that the fossils were more divergent from 

 the modern representatives the deeper or the older the 

 strata in which they occurred. 



The study of fossil plants dates from the beginning 

 of the nineteenth century, when Von Schlot- p a ia. on . 

 heim (1764-1832), one of Werner's pupils, toiogy of 

 published what was probably the first illus- 

 trated volume devoted to the subject. Much more 



