Correspondence. 259 
m(iridiens les plus diff^'^reiites." But, as he says, it was only a first draft, 
too imperfect for publication; and it was only in 1821 that he publish^ 
in the Annales cles Mines, his masterly paper: Buries caraeteres zoologiques 
des formations. From that day. Comparative paleontology was founded; 
and the first application of the principles and methods developed in the 
memoir was on the celebrated fossil localities of the "Montague des 
Fiz vallee de Servoz," Savoie, at the foot of the Mont Blanc, and "La 
Teste du Rhone," near Geneva, where Brongniart recognized by the fos- 
sil remains the identity of these formations with the Glauconie crayeuse 
of Paris basin and the Oault and Qreen Sand of England. 
I have enjoyed the privilege of knowing personallj' and meeting often 
Alexander Brongniart during the two last years of his life, in 1846 and 
1847. He kept all his enthusiasm for parallelism and synchronism of 
formations at great distances by means of fossil remains, and followed 
with close attention all the work done in that direction by the younger 
generation of geologists, who then began to be divided into two branches, 
the geologist without any other qualification and the stratigraphic pale- 
ontologist. Brongniart saw the exaggeration of some in too great gener- 
alization of his principles, and was adverse to it. Alcide d'Orbigny 
more specially frightened him with his great number of successive cre- 
ations of faunas; and I must add that he was far from accepting the many 
great universal cataclysms insisted upon by Elie de Beaumont. Brong- 
niart was more in harmony with the views of Deshayes, who truly estab- 
lished the three great divisions of the Tertiary strata, according to the 
faunas, in working out his great and most important publication: De- 
scription des coquilles fossiles des environs de Paris, 1824-31. 
Lyell did not work out the Tertiary fossils, he only used Deshayes' 
researches and applied to the result arrived at a good nomenclature, 
calling the Tertiary formations: Eocene, Miocene and Pliocene. When 
Lyell came to Paris, in 1823, he knew next to nothing of the Tertiary 
strata, and it was there and then that Constant Pr(^vost showed him all 
the divisions and classification, by great groups, and bed by bed, as they 
have been established by the joint efforts and discoveries of Cuvier, 
Brongniart, Deshayes and Pr<?vost himself. 
There is no doubt that the school of paleontologists, which contained 
such great observers as de Buch, Agassiz, d'Obigny, Quenstedt, etc., did 
go too far in their generalization. Deshayes never accepted their extreme 
ideas, and always maintained passage of forms and even sometimes of 
species from one formation to another. 
I shall not refer to many points of geographical zoology and evolution 
of forms, more or less appreciated in professor Williams' paper, but shall 
only say that speaking of "The scope of paleontology and its value to 
geologists" without quoting the magnificent and grand discoveries and 
papers of Barrande, seems a very extraordinary forgetf ulness, and equally 
BO is a complete absence of reference to the discoverer of the m-Jthod and 
principle, Alexander Brongniart. Even reference to the works of those 
who have made use,with great success, of Brongniart's methods in Amer- 
ica, is very incomplete and partial, for some of the first and best investi- 
