II PROGRESS OF PALEONTOLOGY 35 



organic remains. Steno discusses their value as 

 evidence of repeated alteration of marine and 

 terrestrial conditions upon the soil of Tuscany in 

 a manner worthy of a modern geologist. The 

 speculations of De Maillet in the beginning of 

 the eighteenth century turn upon fossils ; and 

 Buffon follows him very closely in those two 

 remarkable works, the " Theorie de la Terre " and 

 the " Epoques de la Nature " with which he com- 

 menced and ended his career as a naturalist. 



The opening sentences of the "Epoques de la 

 Nature " show us how fully Buffon recognised the 

 analogy of geological with archaeological inquiries. 

 "As in civil history we consult deeds, seek for 

 coins, or decipher. antique inscriptions in order to 

 determine the epochs of human revolutions and 

 fix the date of moral events ; so, in natural history, 

 we must search the archives of the world, recover 

 old monuments from the bowels of the earth, 

 collect their fragmentary remains, and gather into 

 one body of evidence all the signs of physical 

 change which may enable us to look back upon 

 the different ages of nature. It is our only means 

 of fixing some points in the immensity of space, 

 and of setting a certain number of waymarks 

 along the eternal path of time." 



Buffon enumerates five classes of these 

 monuments of the past history of the earth, and 

 they are all facts of pala3 ontology. In the first 

 place, he says, shells and other marine productions 



D 2 



