26 The Founders of Geology LECT. 



As far back as the year 1*751, when he was thirty-six 

 years old, he presented to the Academy a memoir on 

 certain little-known fossil bodies, in which he struck, as 

 it were, the keynote of his future life in regard to the 

 organic remains enclosed within the stony records of former 

 ages. Like a man entering a vast charnel-house, he sees 

 on every side proofs of dead organisms. Others had 

 observed these proofs before him, and had recognized their 

 meaning, and he alludes to the labours of his predecessors. 

 He especially singles out Palissy, who, though known chiefly 

 for eminence as a potter, was the first, some two hundred 

 years before, to embrace fossil shells in his view of Nature, 

 to maintain that those shells were the productions of 

 the sea, not of the earth, as had been supposed, and to 

 demonstrate from them that France once lay beneath the 

 sea, which had left behind it such vast quantities of the 

 remains of the creatures that peopled its waters. 



In Normandy, whence many of Guettard's early col- 

 lections came, and where the people of the country looked 

 upon certain fossil bodies as forms of fruit pears and 

 apples that had fallen from the trees and taken a solid 

 form within the earth he tells how half-witted he seemed 

 to them when he expressed a doubt regarding what they 

 believed to be an obvious truth. He recognized the 

 animal nature of the organisms, and asserted that the so- 

 called peaches, apples and pears all belonged to the class 

 of corals, though many of them are now known to be 

 sponges. 



Of all his numerous and voluminous essays on palseonto- 

 logical subjects, perhaps that which most signally displays 

 Guettard's modern and philosophical habit of mind in 



