THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN PALEONTOLOGY 



been disposed to accept it in the closing days of the 

 eighteenth century. Then, in 1809, it had been con- 

 tended for by one of the early workers in systematic 

 paleontology, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who had studied 

 the fossil shells about Paris while Cuvier studied the 

 vertebrates, and who had been led by these studies to 

 conclude that there had been not merely a rotation but 

 a progression of life on the globe. He found the fossil 

 shells the fossils of invertebrates, as he himself had 

 christened them in deeper strata than Cuvier's verte- 

 brates; and he believed that there had been long ages 



HYRACHYUS, OR RUNNING RHINOCEROS, PROM SOUTHERN WYOMING 



when no higher forms than these were in existence, and 

 that in successive ages fishes, and then reptiles, had been 

 the highest of animate creatures, before mammals, in- 

 cluding man, appeared. Looking beyond the pale of his 

 bare facts, as genius sometimes will, he had insisted that 

 these progressive populations had developed one from 



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