LAMARCK'S WORK IN GEOLOGY 113 



one to admit, with Bruguifere,* the existence of deep- 

 water shell-fish and polyps, which, like him, I distin- 

 guish from littoral shells and polyps. 



" The two sorts of monuments of which I have 

 above spoken, namely, littoral and deep-sea fossils, 

 may be, and often should be, found separated by dif- 

 ferent beds in the same bank or in the same moun- 



* Brugui^re (1750-1799), a conchologist of great merit. His de- 

 scriptions of new species were clear and precise. In his paper on the 

 coal mines of the mountains of Cevennes (Choix de Memoires d'Hist. 

 Nat., 1792) he made the first careful study of the coal formation in the 

 Cevennes, including its beds of coal, sandstone, and shale. A. de 

 Jussieu had previously supposed that the immense deposits of coal 

 were due to sudden cataclysms or to one of the great revolutions of 

 the earth during which the seas of the East or West Indies, having 

 been driven as far as into Europe, had deposited on its soil all these 

 exotic plants to be found there, after having torn them up on their 

 way. 



But Brugui^re, who is to be reckoned among the early uniformi- 

 tarians, says that " the capacity for observation is now too well-in- 

 formed to be contented with such a theory," and he explains the 

 formation of coal deposits in the following essentially modern way : 



" The stores of coal, although formed of vegetable substances, owe 

 their origin to the sea. It is when the places-where we now find 

 them were covered by its waters that tfiese prodigious masses of 

 vegetable substances'were gathered there, and this operation of nature, 

 which astonishes the imagination, far from depending on any extraor- 

 dinary commotion of the globe, seems, on the contrary, to be only the 

 result of time, of an order of things now existing, and especially that 

 of slow changes" (i, pp. 116, 117). 



The proofs he brings forward are the horizontality of the beds, both 

 of coal and deposits between them, the marine shells in the sand- 

 stones, the fossil fishes intermingled with the plant remains in the 

 shales ; moreover, some of the coal deposits are covered by beds 

 of limestone containing marine shells which lived in the sea at a 

 very great depth. The alternation of these beds, the great mass of 

 vegetable matter which lived at small distances from the soil which 

 conceals them, and the occurrence of these beds so high up, show 

 that at this time Europe was almost wholly covered by the sea, the 

 summits of the Alps and the Pyrenees being then, as he says, so many 

 small islands in the midst of the ocean. He also intimates that the 

 climate when these ferns ("bamboo" and "banana") lived was 

 warmer than that of Europe at present. 



In this essay, then, we see a great advance in correctness of geo- 

 logical observation and reasoning over any previous writers, while its 

 suggestions were appreciated and adopted by Lamarck. 



