ISO 



LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



and sudden extinctions of life, and as sudden recrea- 

 tions. Cuvier was a natural leader of men, a ready 

 debater, and a clear, forcible writer, a man of great 

 executive force, but lacking in insight and imagina- 

 tion ; he dominated scientific Paris and France, he was 

 the law-giver and autocrat of the laboratories of Paris, 

 and the views of quiet, thoughtful, profound scholars 

 such as Lamarck and Geoffroy St. Hilaire were dis- 

 dainfully pushed aside, overborne, and the progress 

 of geological thought was arrested, while, owing to 

 his great prestige, the rising views of the Lamarckian 

 school were nipped in the bud. Every one, after the 

 appearance of Cuvier's great work on fossil mammals 

 and of his Rbgne Animal, was a Cuvierian, and down 

 to the time of Lyell and of Charles Darwin all natural- 

 ists, with only here and there an exception, were pro- 

 nounced Cuvierians in biology and geology — catas- 

 trophists rather than uniformitarians. We now, with 

 the increase of knowledge of physical and historical 

 geology, of the succession of life on the earth, of the 

 unity of organization pervading that life from monad 

 to man all through the ages from the Precambrian to 

 the present age, know that there were vast periods 

 of preparation followed by crises, perhaps geologically 

 brief, when there were widespread changes in physi- 

 cal geography, which reacted on the life-forms, render- 

 ing certain ones extinct, and modifying others ; but 

 this conception is entirely distinct from the views of 

 Cuvier and his school, * which may, in the light of 



* Cuvier, in speaking of these revolutions, "which have changed 

 the surface of our earth," correctly reasons that they must have ex- 

 cited a more powerful action upon terrestrial quadrupeds than upon 



