LAMARCK'S WORK IN GEOLOGY 109 



As authentic and unimpeachable proofs of the 

 former existence of the sea where now it is absent, 

 Lamarck cites the occurrence of fossils in rocks in- 

 land. Lamarck's first paper on fossils was read to 

 the Institute in 1799, or about three years previous 

 to the publication of the Hydrog^ologie. He restricts 

 the term " fossils " to vegetable and animal remains, 

 since the word in his time was by some loosely ap- 

 plied to minerals as well as fossils ; to anything dug 

 out of the earth. " We find fossils," he says, " on 

 dry land, even in the middle of continents and large 

 islands ; and not only in places far removed from the 

 sea, but even on mountains and in their bowels, at 

 considerable heights, each part of the earth's surface 

 having at some time been a veritable ocean bottom." 

 He then quotes at length accounts of such instances 

 from Buffon, and notices their prodigious number, 

 and that while the greater number are marine, others 

 are fresh-water and terrestrial shells, and the marine 

 shells may be divided into littoral and pelagic. 



" This distinction is very important to make, be- 

 cause the consideration of fossils is, as we have already 

 said, one of the principal means of knowing well the 

 revolutions which have taken place on the surface of 

 our globe. This subject is of great importance, and 

 under this point of view it should lead naturalists to 

 study fossil shells, in order to compare them with 

 their analogues which we can discover in the sea ; 

 finally, to carefully seek the places where each species 



also explains the later transgressions of the sea by the progressive ac- 

 cumulation of sediments which raise the level of the sea by their de- 

 position at its bottom. Thus he believes that the true factor in the 

 deformation of the globe is vertical descent, and not, as Neumayr had 

 previously thought, the folding of the crust. 



