MEMOIR OF LAMARCK. 24 1 



and twenty-three years later the judicious Cuvier still 

 yielded to the prevailing custom in publishing his 

 * Discoveries on the Earth's Revolutions.' 



" Lamarck's merit was to have discovered that there 

 had been no catastrophes, but that the gradual action 

 of forces during thousands of ages accounted for the 

 changes observable upon the face of the earth, better 

 than any sudden and violent perturbations. ' Nature,' 

 he writes, ' has no difficulty on th^ score of time ; she 

 has it always at command ; it is with her a boundless 

 space in which she has room for the greatest as for the 

 smallest operations.' " 



Here we must not forget Buffon's fine passage, 

 " Nature's great workman is Time," &c. See page 103. 



" Lamarck," continues M. Martins, " was the first 

 to distinguish littoral from ocean fossils, but no one 

 accepts his theory that oceans make their beds deeper 

 owing to the action of the tidesj and distribute them- 

 selves differently over the earth's surface without any 

 change of level of the different parts of that surface. 



" Settling down to a single branch of science, in con- 

 sequence of his professorship, Lamarck now devoted 

 himself to the twofold labour of lecturing and classify- 

 ing the collections at the museum. In 1802 he 

 published his ' Considerations on the Organization of 

 Living Bodies '; in 1809 his ' Philo^ophie Zoohgiqwe,' a 

 development of the ' Considerations ' ; and from 1816 

 to 1822 his Natural History of the invertebrate ani- 

 mals, in seven volumes. This is his great work, and, 

 being entirely a work of description and classification, 



R 



