CHAPTER IX 



LAMARCK THE FOUNDER OF INVERTEBRATE PAL^- 

 ONTOLOGY 



It was fortunate for palaeontology that the two 

 greatest zoologists of the end of the eighteenth and 

 the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Lamarck 

 and Cuvier, lived in the Paris basin, a vast cemetery 

 of corals, shells, and mammals ; and not far from 

 extensive deposits of cretaceous rocks packed with 

 fossil invertebrates. With their then unrivalled 

 knowledge of recent or existing forms, they could 

 restore the assemblages of extinct animals which 

 peopled the cretaceous ocean, and more especially the 

 tertiary seas and lakes. 



Lamarck drew his supplies of tertiary shells from 

 the tertiary beds situated within a radius of from 

 twenty-five to thirty miles from the centre of Paris, 

 and chiefly from the village of Grignon, about ten 

 miles west of Paris, beyond Versailles, and still a rich 

 collecting ground for the students of the Museum 

 and Sorbonne. He acknowledges the aid received 

 from Defrance,* who had already collected at Grignon 

 five hundred species of fossil shells, three-fourths of 

 which, he says, had not then been described. 



Lamarck's first essay (" Sur lesfossiles") on fossils 



* Although Defrance (born I75g, died in 1850) aided Lamarck in 

 collecting tertiary shells, his earliest palseontological paper (on Hip- 

 pon3'x) did not appear until the year 1819. 



