LAMARCK'S WORK IN GEOLOGY 



99 



to the organic beings of the present creation, and 

 that in the very latest formations, fossil remains of 

 species now existing occur. Such advanced views as 

 these would seem to entitle Werner to rank as one of 

 the founders of palaeontology.* 



Hutton's Theory of the Earth appeared in 1785, 

 and in a more developed state, as a separate work, in 

 i79S-t " The ruins of an older world," he said, " are 

 visible in the present .structure of our planet, and the 

 strata which now compose our continents have been 

 once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the 

 waste of preexisting continents. The same forces are 

 still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechan- 

 ical violence, even the hardest rocks, and transport- 

 ing the materials to the sea, \vhere they are spread 

 out and form strata analogous to those of more 

 ancient date. Afthough loosely deposited along the 

 bottom of the ocean, they became afterwards altered 

 and consolidated by volcanic heat, and were then 

 heaved up, fractured, and contorted." Again he said: 

 " In the economy of the world I can find no traces of 

 a beginning, no prospect of an end." As Lyell re- 

 marks : " Hutton imagined that the continents were 

 first gradually destroyed by aqueous degradation, 

 and when their ruins had furnished materials for new 



* J. G. Lehmann of Berlin, in 1756, first formally stated that there 

 was some regular succession in the strata, his observations being 

 based on profiles of the Hartz and the Erzgebirge. He proposed 

 the names Zechstein, Kupferschiefer, rothes Todtliegendes, which 

 still linger in German treatises. G. C. Fuchsel (1762) wrote on the 

 stratigraphy of the coal measures, the Permian and the later systems 

 «in Thuringia. (Zittel.) 



f James Hutton was born at Edinburgh, June 3, 1726, where he died 

 March 26, 1797. 



