WARD.] VIEWS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKY. 395 



(1771), Bauder "^ (1772), and Suckow "» (1782), wrote treatises in the 

 true scientific spirit. But to Blumenbach is generally ascribed the 

 credit of having fairly broken the spell and prepared the way for a 

 science of paleontology. Not only in his "Handbuch" already men- 

 tioned, but also throughout his later " Beitrage" "i which began in 1790, 

 and his other works, he taught with authority that the beings to whose 

 former existence these fossil forms were due were not only antediluvian 

 but preadamitic, and that moreover there had been a series of faunas 

 and floras inhabiting the earth before the age of man. 



The revolution, however, was not instantaneous nor abrupt. It had 

 been preparing for many years and could not have been much longer 

 postponed. To understand the nature of this preparation it will be 

 necessary to consider a few of the questions that came up for discus- 

 sion and solution during the eighteenth century, and in attempting to 

 do this we must now confine ourselves exclusively to those presented 

 by the different forms of fossil vegetation. Without denying the su- 

 perior importance of the evidence from animal remains, it may still be 

 possible to vindicate the truth of the rather paradoxical statement of 

 Brongniart that the vegetable kingdom should perhaps claim the honor 

 of having caused the ridiculous ideas which attributed these remains 

 of the ancient world to freaks of nature and plastic forces to be aban- 

 doned. "^ 



Among these questions the two that seemed to dwarf all others were, 

 first. Are these the remains of the same kind of plants that are now 

 found growing upon the earth ? and, second. When did the originals live 

 that have been preserved in this remarkable manner by turning into 

 stone ? 



When we consider what is now known about the geological strata of 

 the earth's crust we can scarcely realize that but two generations ago 

 comparatively nothing was known on this subject. Geology was not 

 yet born. The investigators of the last century were really not dis- 

 cussing the geologic age of fossil remains. The assumption was uni- 

 versal that these were plants that grew somewhere in the world only a 

 few thousand years ago at most, plants such as either grew then in the 

 countries where their remains were found or in other countries from 

 which they had been brought by one agency or another, generally that 

 of the Flood, or else, as some finally conceived, had been destroyed by 

 these agencies, so as to have no exact living representatives. The 

 writers of that period were therefore more or less divided among these 

 three theories which we may respectively call (1) the indigenous theory, 



109 p_ Yt. Bauder. Nachrict von den seit einigen Jahren zu Altdorf von ihm ent- 

 deckten versteinerten Korpern. Jena, 1772. 



11° Georg Adolph Suckow. Beschreibung einigermerkwurdigen Abdriiokevon der 

 Art der sogenanten Calamiten. Hist, et comment. Acad, elector. Theodoro-Palatinse, 

 Tom. V, Pbysioum Monheimli, 1784, p. 355. 



"1 Beitrage zur Naturgeschichte. 1790-1811. 



"^ Histoire des v6g6taux fossiles. Tome I, p. 2. 



