g8 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



Ueber die aiissern Kennzeichen der Fossilien ap- 

 peared in 1774; his Kurze Klassifikation und Be- 

 schreibung der Gebirgsarten in 1787. He discovered 

 the law of the superposition of stratified rocks, 

 though he wrongly considered volcanic rocks, such as 

 basalt, to be of aqueous origin, being as he supposed 

 formed of chemical precipitates from water. But he 

 was the first to state that the age of different forma- 

 tions can be told by their fossils, certain species 

 being confined to particular beds, while others ranged 

 throughout whole formations, and others seemed to 

 occur in several different formations ; " the original 

 species found in these formations appearing to have 

 been so constituted as to live through a variety of 

 changes which had destroyed hundreds of other 

 species which we find confined to particular beds." * 

 His views as regards fossils, as Jameson states, were 

 probably not known to Cuvier, and it is more than 

 doubtful whether Lamarck knew of them. He 

 observed that fossils appear first in " transition " or 

 palaeozoic strata, and were mainly corals and molluscs; 

 that in the older carboniferous rocks the fossils are 

 of higher types, such as fish and amphibious animals ; 

 while in the tertiary or alluvial strata occur the re- 

 mains of birds and quadrupeds. He thought that 

 marine plants were more ancient than land plants. 

 His studies led him to infer that the fossils con- 

 tained in the oldest rocks are very different from any 

 of the species of the present time ; that the newer the 

 formation, the more do the remains approach in form 



* Jameson's Cuvier' s Theory of the Earth, New York, 1818. 



