LAMARCK'S WORK IN GEOLOGY 



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a great part of its thickness and in the mountain 

 masses — have they not had opportunities to convince 

 themselves that the antiquity of this same globe is so 

 great that it is absolutely beyond the power of man 

 to appreciate it in an adequate way ! 



" Assuredly our chronologies do not extend back 

 very far, and they could only have been made by 

 propping them up by fables. Traditions, both oral 

 and written, become necessarily lost, and it is in the 

 nature of things that this should be so. 



" Even if the invention of printing had been more 

 ancient than it is, what would have resulted at the 

 end of ten thousand years? Everything changes, 

 everything becomes ftiodified, everything becomes 

 lost or destroyed. Every living language insensibly 

 changes its idiom ; at the end of a thousand years 

 the writings made in any language can only be read 

 with difficulty ; after two thousand years none of 

 these writings will be understood. Besides wars, 

 vandalism, the greediness of tyrants and of those 

 who guide religious opinions, who always rely on the 

 ignorance of the human race and are supported by it, 

 how many are the causes, as proved by history and the 

 sciences, of epochs after epochs of revolutions, which 

 have more or less completely destroyed them. 



" How many are the causes by which man loses all 

 trace of that which has existed, and cannot believe 

 nor even conceive of the immense antiquity of the 

 earth he inhabits ! 



" How great will yet seem this antiquity of the 

 terrestrial globe in the eyes of man when he shall 

 form a just idea of the origin of living bodies, as also 

 of the causes of the development and of the gradual 

 process of perfection of the organization of these 

 bodies, and especially when it will be conceived that, 

 time and favorable circumstances having been neces- 

 sary to give existence to all the living species such as 

 we actually see, he is himself the last result and the 



