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PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Crystallization, treating especially of the variety of forms assumed by 

 the same mineral substance. He was also the author, in 1837, of 

 two treatises on Mineralogy and Geology which are much esteemed ; 

 that on Geology having passed through five editions, and being 

 adopted by the University of France as a text-book. 



M. Marie-Henri Ducrotay de Blainville, Member of the 

 Academy of Sciences in France, succeeded Lamarck as Professor of 

 Natural History in Paris, and was afterwards chosen to replace Cuvier 

 in the chair of Comparative Anatomy. His exertions in these de- 

 partments of science were pursued uninterruptedly throughout half a 

 century, and the catalogue of his memoirs and works given by Agas- 

 siz in his ' Bibliographia ' amounts to no less a list than 1 50, — a list 

 which might have been enlarged, as I learn from M. Constant Pre- 

 vost, to 1 80, none of them without merit, and some, like his * Manuel 

 de Malacologie et Conchologie,' and his * Osteography of the Verte- 

 brate Classes,' being elaborate treatises which might well have cost 

 a zoologist the labour of a life. 



The * Osteography,' published in 1839-40, comprised the extinct as 

 well as living types of vertebrate animals, and is the most important 

 of those contributions to Palaeontology which gave him a title to be 

 enrolled as one of our Foreign Members. M. de Blainville was 

 himself a good artist, and the figures of the skulls and skeletons of 

 nearly all the orders of mammalia which illustrate this treatise, are 

 regarded by many eminent zoologists as the most accurate hitherto 

 published. 



In a controversy into which M. de Blainville entered respecting the 

 place in the animal kingdom to be assigned to the celebrated fossils 

 of the Stonesfield oolite, he opposed the previously declared opinion 

 of Cuvier that they were true insectivorous mammals, and was in- 

 clined to believe in their reptilian character, — an opinion from which 

 the most skilful comparative anatomists of Europe dissent ; but while 

 they decline to bow to his authority on this point, they do not dispute 

 the general soundness of his views, still less the extraordinary range 

 and profoundness of his knowledge of the animal kingdom. 



"It was the great object of his life," says M. Prevost, "to esta- 

 blish in all his works, especially in his ' Osteology,' the doctrine that 

 the whole series of organic beings was intimately related, the links of 



