WORK IN PALEONTOLOGY 



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ary or intermediate periods of from three to five 

 million years each — " a duration infinitely small 

 relative to those required for all the changes of the 

 earth's surface." 



He refers in an appreciative way to the first special 

 treatise on fossil shells ever published, that of an 

 Englishman named Brander,* who collected the shells 

 " out of the cliffs by the sea-coast between Christ 

 Church and Lymington, but more especially about 

 the cliffs by the village of Hordwell," where the strata 

 are filled with these fossils. Lamarck, working upon 

 collections of tertiary shells from Grignon and also 

 from Courtagnon near Reims, with the aid of Bran- 

 der's work showed that these beds, not known to 

 be Eocene, extended into Hampshire, England ; thus 

 being the first to correlate by their fossils, though 

 in a limited way to be sure, the tertiary beds of 

 France with those of England. 



How he at a later period (1805) regarded fossils 



beds of fossil shells on the land present the closest possible analogy 

 to the flow of the present sea, so that it becomes impossible to doubt 

 that the accidents, such as broken and worn shells, which have affected 

 the fossil organisms, arose from precisely the same causes as those of 

 exactly the same nature that still befall their successors on the existing 

 ocean bottom. On the other hand, Geikie observes that it must be 

 acknowledged " that Guettard does not seem to have had any clear 

 ideas of the sequence of formations and of geological structures." 



* Scheuchzer's " Complaint and Vindication of the Fishes " (Piseium 

 Querelae et Vindiciae, Germany, 1708), " a work of zoological merit, 

 in which he gave some good plates and descriptions of fossil fish " 

 (Lyell). Gesner's treatise on pretrefactions preceded Lamarck's work 

 in this direction, as did Brander's Fossillia Hantoniensia, published 

 in 1766, which contained " excellent figures of fossil shells from the 

 more modern (or Eocene) marine strata of Hampshire. In his opinion 

 fossil animals and testacea were, for the most part, of unknown 

 species, and of such as were known the living analogues now belonged 

 to southern latitudes " (Lyell's Principles, eighth edition, p. 46). 



