328 BIOLOGY AND ITS MAKERS 
highest places of recognition in the government, acclaimed 
as the Jove of natural science; Lamarck, hard-working, ha- 
rassed by poverty, insufficiently recognized, and, although 
more gifted than his confrére, overlooked by the scientific 
men of the time. The judgment of the relative position of 
these two men in natural science is now being reversed, and 
on the basis of intellectual supremacy Lamarck is coming 
into general recognition as the better man of the two. In 
the chapters dealing with organic evolution some events in 
the life of this remarkable man will be given. 
The Arrangement of Fossils in Strata.—The other name 
associated with Lamarck and Cuvier is that of William Smith, 
the English surveyor. Both Lamarck and Cuvier were men 
of extended scientific training, but William Smith had a 
moderate education as a surveyor. While the two former 
were able to express scientific opinions upon the nature of 
the fossil forms discovered, William Smith went at his task 
as an observer with a clear and unprejudiced mind, an 
observer who walked about over the fields, noticing the con- 
ditions of rocks and of fossil forms embedded therein. He 
noted that the organic remains were distributed in strata, 
and that particular forms of fossil life characterized par- 
ticular strata and occupied the same relative position to one 
another. He found, for illustration, that certain particular 
forms would be found underlying certain other forms in one 
mass of rocks in a certain part of the country. Wherever 
he traveled, and whatever rocks he examined, he found these 
forms occupying the same relative positions, and thus he 
came to the conclusion that the living forms within the rocks 
constitute a stratified series, having definite and unvarying 
arrangement with reference to one another. 
In short, the work of these three men—Cuvier, Lamarck, 
and William Smith—placed the new science of paleontology 
upon a secure basis at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
