330 BIOLOGY AND ITS MAKERS 



highest places of recognition in the government, acclaimed 

 as the Jove of natural science; Lamarck, hard-working, ha- 

 rassed by poverty, insufficiently recognized, and, although 

 more gifted than his confrere, overlooked by the scientific 

 men of the time. The judgment of the relative position of 

 these two men in natural science is now being reversed, an 

 on the basis of intellectual supremacy Lamarck is coming 

 into general recognition as the better man of the two. In 

 the chapters dealing with organic evolution some events in 

 the life of this remarkable man will be given. 



The Arrangement of Fossils in Strata. — The other name 

 associated with Lamarck and Cuvier is that of William Smith, 

 the English surveyor. Both Lamarck and Cuvier were men 

 of extended scientific training, but William Smith had a 

 moderate education as a surveyor. While the two former 

 were able to express scientific opinions upon the nature of 

 the fossil forms discovered, William Smith went at his task 

 as an observer with a clear and unprejudiced mind, an 

 observer who walked about over the fields, noticing the con- 

 ditions of rocks and of fossil forms embedded therein. He 

 noted that the organic remains were distributed in strata, 

 and that particular forms of fossil life characterized par- 

 ticular strata and occupied the same relative position to one 

 another. He found, for illustration, that certain particular 

 forms would be found underlying certain other forms in one 

 mass of rocks in a certain part of the country. Wherever 

 he traveled, and whatever rocks he examined, he found these 

 forms occupying the same relative positions, and thus he 

 came to the conclusion that the living forms within the rocks 

 constitute a stratified series, having definite and unvarying 

 arrangement with reference to one another. 



In short, the work of these three men — Cuvier, Lamarck, 

 and William Smith — placed the new science of palaeontology 

 upon a secure basis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 





I 



