WORJC IN PALEONTOLOGY 



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mals whose living analogues we know are the less 

 ancient fossils. The species to which each of them 

 belongs had doubtless not yet time to vary in any of 

 its forms. 



" We should, then, never expect to find among the 

 living species the totality of those that we meet with 

 in the fossil state, and yet we cannot conclude that 

 any species can really be lost or extinct. It is un- 

 doubtedly possible that among the largest animals 

 some species have been destroyed as a result of the 

 multiplication of man in the regions where they live. 

 But this conjecture cannot be based on the consider- 

 ation of fossils alone ; we can only form an opinion in 

 this respect when all the inhabited parts of the globe 

 will have become perfectly known." 



Lamarck did not have, as we now have, a knowledge 

 of the geological succession of organic forms. The 

 comparatively full and detailed view which we possess 

 of the different vast assemblages of plant and animal 

 life which have successively peopled the surface of 

 our earth is a vision on which his eyes never rested. 

 His slight, piecemeal glimpse of the animal life of the 

 Paris Basin, and of the few other extinct forms then 

 known, was all he had to depend upon or reason from. 

 He was not disposed to believe that the thread of life 

 once begun in the earliest times could be arbitrarily 

 broken by catastrophic means ; that there was no re- 

 lation whatever between the earlier and later faunas. 

 He utterly opposed Cuvier's view that species once 

 formed could ever be lost or become extinct without 

 ancestors or descendants. He on the contrary be- 

 lieved that species underwent a slow modification, and 

 that the fossil forms are the ancestors of the animals 

 now living. Moreover, Lamarck was the inventor of 

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