HISTORICAL GEOLOGY 117 



ing forms, he saw that most of the fossils were of extinct 

 species, and in this way he came to be the founder of 

 modern invertebrate paleontology. He also maintained 

 after 1801 that life has been continuous since its origin 

 and that nature has been uniform in the course of its 

 development. Marsh adds : 



"His researches on the invertebrate fossils of the Paris Basin, 

 although less striking, were not less important than those of 

 Cuvier on the vertebrates ; while the conclusions he derived from 

 them form the basis of modern biology." 



' ' Lamarck was the prophetic genius, half a century in advance 

 of his time." 



Cuvier established comparative anatomy and verte- 

 brate paleontology, and was one of the first to point out 

 that fossil animals are nearly all extinct forms. He 

 came to the latter conclusion in 1796 through a study of 

 fossil elephants found in Europe. "Cuvier enriched 

 the animal kingdom by the introduction of fossil forms 

 among the living, bringing all together into one compre- 

 hensive system." This opened to him entirely new 

 views respecting the theory of the earth, and he devoted 

 more than twenty-five years to developing the theories 

 of special creation and catastrophism, described in his 

 Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe. 

 "With all his knowledge of the earth, he could not free 

 himself from tradition, and believed in the universality 

 and power of the Mosaic deluge. Again, he refused to 

 admit the evidence brought forward by his distinguished 

 colleagues against the permanence of species, and used 

 all his great influence to crush out the doctrine of evolu- 

 tion, then first proposed " (Marsh). 



In England it was William Smith (1769-1839) who 

 independently discovered the chronogenetic significance 

 of fossils, and in their stratigraphic superposition indi- 

 cated the way for the study of historical geology. He 

 first published on this matter in 1799, but his completed 

 statements came in works entitled ' ' Strata identified by 

 Organized Fossils," 1816-1820, and " Stratigraphical 

 System of Organized Fossils," 1817. 



Invertebrate paleontology in America during the 

 Catastrophic period had its beginning in Lesueur, who 



