A Geological Retrospect of the Tear 1S^2. 153 



consist of substances wbicli are almost entii'ely compounds ? With, 

 the confident anticipation that how much soever his contemporaries 

 ^nd their successors might retard the recognition of what he felt 

 assured was a great discovery made by himself, Lamarck announced 

 that there must exist in Nature a certain powerful and ever active 

 cause which, while it counteracts the natural tendency of compound 

 substances to break up into their constituent parts, is ceaselessly 

 at work on its o\vn side in forming new combinations. He 

 triumphantly declared that this potent cause can be none other 

 than the organic action of plant and animal life. Maintaining that 

 the elements could never of themselves have formed the host of 

 compound bodies on the face and within the crust of the globe, he 

 went on to assert that without the operation of life, the ' Pouvoir 

 de la Vie,' not one of these compound bodies could ever have 

 come into existence (p. 106). Not only did he affirm that by the 

 immediate action of vegetation, carbon, bitumen, coal, alumina, 

 potass, clays, iron, and other mineral substances are formed, and 

 that the action of animals gives rise to calcareous material, 

 phosphates, sulphur, nitre, and other compounds (pp. Ill, 118, 141, 

 153), but he claimed that, without exception, all the compound 

 substances in the inorganic world, minerals and rocks alike, are 

 nothing but the remains and debris of once living bodies (p. 115). 



Protrusions of igneous matter into the terrestrial crust have thus 

 no place in his system. Yet although he believed all amorphous 

 •rocks to have been accumulated under water he rejected Werner's 

 doctrine of an universal ocean. The origin of granite, for instance, 

 he explained by a complicated process wherein the essential 

 molecules of the several minerals that constitute the rock are first 

 disintegrated by the action of organisms ; these molecules are then 

 transported from the land by rivers into the sea, where they are 

 deposited and come together to form the aggregate granite mass 

 (pp. 14:2-145). So far from looking upon the granitic core of a 

 mountain-chain as a plutonic intrusion from an inner magma, he 

 regarded it as evidence of the site of a former river-current, by 

 which its matei'ials were built up on the sea-floor during the retreat 

 of the oceanic waters, and the consequent emergence of the western 

 shores of the land (pp. 145-149). As some rivers flow in tolerably 

 straight courses for hundreds of miles, he could see no reason why, 

 as the sea retired, they should not have accumulated granitic ridges 

 as long as the longest crystalline core now to be seen in any 

 mountain-chain. Obviously not even the wildest hypothesis of the 

 J'reiberg School was more completely a child of the imagination 

 than this extraordinary speculation of the illustrious biologist of 

 Paris.^ 



1 His speculations on this subject, ho-wever, were not all original on the part of 

 Lamarck. Cuvier, in his " Discours sur les Eevolutions de la Surface du Globe" 

 (3rded., 1825, p. 24), alludes to their pi-evalence, especially in Germany, at least 

 as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century, and to their recent develop- 

 ment by his French contemporary in the " Hydrogeologie " and " Philosophie 

 -Zoologique." 



{To be concluded in our next number.) 



