^ 



2G6 TIIEOEIES AS TO THE NATURE OF SPECIES. [Cir. XXXY. 



This reply, when we consider its date (abont the year 1809), 

 may well lay claim to our admiration, as it evinced Lamarck's 

 thorough conviction, that geological changes are brought 

 about so slowly that the lapse of thirty or forty centuries 

 is utterly insignificant in the history of a species. Nearly 

 all the men of science of his day, even the great majority o^f 

 geologists, entertained extremely narrow views in regard to 

 the duration of those periods of the past of which they 

 were studying the archives. They were generally inclined 

 to attribute all great changes of the earth's crust, and its 

 inhabitants, to brief and violent catastrophes, against which 



)haticaUy protested.^" Yet neither he nor any 

 of his contemporaries could as yet form any conception of 



Lamarck em 



mag 



mate world with which paleontology has since made us 

 familiar. In certain passages of his work he admitted that 

 possibly the Paleotherium, Anoplotherium, and some other 



fossil genera of quadrupeds then recently described by Cuvier 



may 



man 



exterminated 

 er animals, es 



the aquatic tribes, which could not have been the victims 

 of human intervention, he sometimes expressed a 



doubt 



whether most of these may not still have their representatives 



surviving in regions nnexj^lored hj the naturalist. 



Being 



forms 



mals and plants preserved in the rocks are more unlike 

 those now existing in proportion as they are more ancient^ 

 Lamarck exnresspd his hplipf ilm-f, in flinsp pn«pa wLpt-a +Tir. 



animals 



modern 



fc) 



limits, t 



time to vary^ except within extremely narrow 



It was hj this constant reference to time as an essential 

 element even in the definition of a species, that the teaching 



amar 



Cuvier. 



^ Phil. Zool. p. 80. 



t Ibid. chap, iii., De I'Espcce, p. 79. 



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