g6 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



sea is the most potent destroyer of the land, and that 

 the material thus removed is deposited either on the 

 land or along the shores of the sea. Rethought that 

 the levels of the valleys are at present being raised, 

 owing to the deposit of detritus in them. He points 

 out that the deposits laid down by the ocean do not 

 extend far out to sea, " that consequently the eleva- 

 tions of new mountains in the sea, by the deposition 

 of sediment, is a process very difKcult to conceive ; 

 that the transport of the sediment as far as the equa- 

 tor is not less improbable ; and that still more diffi- 

 cult to accept is the suggestion that the sediment 

 from our continent is carried into the seas of the 

 New World. In short, we are still very little ad- 

 vanced towards the theory of the earth as it now 

 exists." Guettard was the first to discover the vol- 

 canoes of Auvergne, but he was " hopelessly wrong " 

 in regard to the origin of basalt, forestalling Werner 

 in his mistakes as to its aqueous origin. He was 

 thus the first Neptunist, while, as Geikie states, his 

 " observations in Auvergne practically started the 

 Vulcanist camp." 



We now come to Lamarck's own time. He must 

 have been familiar with the results of Pallas's travels 

 in Russia and Siberia (1793-94). The distinguished 

 German zoologist and geologist, besides working out 

 the geology of the Ural Mountains, showed, in 1777, 

 that there was a general law in the formation of all 

 mountain chains composed chiefly of primary rocks ; * 

 the granitic axis being flanked by schists, and these 



* Lyell's Principles of Geology. 



