LAMARCK THE FOUNDER OF INVERTEBRATE PALÆONTOLOGY
It was fortunate for palæontology that the two greatest zoölogists 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,[81] 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 les fossiles_") on fossils in general was
published at the end of his _Système des Animaux sans Vertèbres_
(pp. 401-411), in 1801, a year before the publication of the
_Hydrogéologie_. "I give the name _fossils_," he says, "to remains of
living beings, changed by their long sojourn in the earth or under
water, but whose forms and structure are still recognizable.
"From this point of view, the bones of vertebrate animals and the
remains of testaceous molluscs, of certain crustacea, of many
echinoderms, coral polyps, when after having been for a long time
buried in the earth or hidden under the sea, will have undergone an
alteration which, while changing their substance, has nevertheless
destroyed neither their forms, their figures, nor the special
features of their structures."
He goes on to say that the animal parts having been destroyed, the shell
remains, being composed of calcareous matter. This shell, then, has lost
its lustre, its colors, and often even its nacre, if it had any; and in
this altered condition it is usually entirely white. In some cases where
the shells have remained for a long period buried in a mud of some
particular color, the shell receives the same color.
"In France, the fossil shells of Courtagnon near Reims, Grignon near
Versailles, of what was formerly Touraine, etc., are almost all
still in this calcareous state, having more or less completely lost
their animal parts--namely, their lustre, their peculiar colors, and
their nacre.
"Other fossils have undergone such an alteration that not only have
they lost their animal portion, but their substance has been changed
into a silicious matter. I give to this second kind of fossil the
name of _silicious fossils_, and examples of this kind are the
different oysters ('des ostracites'), many terebratulæ ('des
terebratulites'), trigoniæ, ammonites, echinites, encrinites, etc.
"The fossils of which I have just spoken are in part buried in the
earth, and others lie scattered over its surface. They occur in all
the exposed parts of our globe, in the middle even of the largest
continents, and, what is very remarkable, they occur on mountains up
to very considerable altitudes. In many places the fossils buried in
the earth form banks extending several leagues in length."[82]
Conchologists, he says, did not care to collect or study fossil shells,
because they had lost their lustre, colors, and beauty, and they were
rejected from collections on this account as "dead" and uninteresting.
"But," he adds, "since attention has been drawn to the fact that these
fossils are extremely valuable _monuments_ for the study of the
revolutions which have taken place in different regions of the earth,
and of the changes which the beings living there have themselves
successively undergone (in my lectures I have always insisted on these
considerations), consequently the search for and study of fossils have
excited special interest, and are now the objects of the greatest
interest to naturalists."
Lamarck then combats the views of several naturalists, undoubtedly
referring to Cuvier, that the fossils are extinct species, and that the
earth has passed through a general catastrophe (_un bouleversement
universel_) with the result that a multitude of species of animals and
plants were consequently absolutely lost or destroyed, and remarks in
the following telling and somewhat derisive language:
"A universal catastrophe (_bouleversement_) which necessarily
regulates nothing, mixes up and disperses everything, is a very
convenient way to solve the problem for those naturalists who wish
to explain everything, and who do not take the trouble to observe
and investigate the course followed by nature as respects its
production and everything which constitutes its domain. I have
already elsewhere said what should be thought of this so-called
universal overturning of the globe; I return to fossils.
"It is very true that, of the great quantity of fossil shells
gathered in the different countries of the earth, there are yet but
a very small number of species whose living or marine analogues are
known. Nevertheless, although this number may be very small, which
no one will deny, it is enough to suppress the universality
announced in the proposition cited above.
"It is well to remark that among the fossil shells whose marine or
living analogues are not known, there are many which have a form
closely allied to shells of the same genera known to be now living
in the sea. However, they differ more or less, and cannot be
rigorously regarded as the same species as those known to be living,
since they do not perfectly resemble them. These are, it is said,
extinct species.
"I am convinced that it is possible never to find, among fresh or
marine shells, any shells perfectly similar to the fossil shells of
which I have just spoken. I believe I know the reason; I proceed to
succinctly indicate, and I hope that it will then be seen, that
although many fossil shells are different from all the marine
shells known, this does not prove that the species of these shells
are extinct, but only that these species have changed as the result
of time, and that actually they have different forms from those
individuals whose fossil remains we have found."
Then he goes on in the same strain as in the opening discourse, saying
that nothing terrestrial remains constant, that geological changes are
continually occurring, and that these changes produce in living
organisms a diversity of habits, a different mode of life, and as the
result modifications or developments in their organs and in the shape of
their parts.
"We should still realize that all the modifications which the
organism undergoes in its structure and form as the result of the
influence of circumstances which would influence this being, are
propagated by generation, and that after a long series of ages not
only will it be able to form new species, new genera, and even new
orders, but also each species will even necessarily vary in its
organization and in its forms.
"We should not be more surprised then if, among the numerous fossils
which occur in all the dry parts of the globe and which offer us the
remains of so many animals which have formerly existed, there should
be found so few of which we know the living analogues. If there is
in this, on the contrary, anything which should astonish us, it is
to find that among these numerous fossil remains of beings which
have lived there should be known to us some whose analogues still
exist, from a germ to a vast multitude of living forms, of different
and ascending grades of perfection, ending in man.
"This fact, as our collection of fossils proves, should lead us to
suppose that the fossil remains of the animals 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 undoubtedly 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
consideration 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 relation 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
believed 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 the first genealogical tree; his phylogeny, in the
second volume of his _Philosophie zoologique_ (p. 463), proves that he
realized that the forms leading up to the existing ones were practically
extinct, as we now use the word. Lamarck in theory was throughout, as
Houssay well says, at one with us who are now living, but a century
behind us in knowledge of the facts needed to support his theory.
In this first published expression of his views on palæontology, we find
the following truths enumerated on which the science is based: (1) The
great length of geological time; (2) The continuous existence of animal
life all through the different geological periods without sudden total
extinctions and as sudden recreations of new assemblages; (3) The
physical environment remaining practically the same throughout in
general, but with (4) continual gradual but not catastrophic changes in
the relative distribution of land and sea and other modifications in the
physical geography, changes which (5) caused corresponding changes in
the habitat, and (6) consequently in the habits of the living beings; so
that there has been all through geological history a slow modification
of life-forms.
Thus Lamarck's idea of creation is _evolutional_ rather than
_uniformitarian_. There was, from his point of view, not simply a
uniform march along a dead level, but a progression, a change from the
lower or generalized to the higher or specialized--an evolution or
unfolding of organic life. In his effort to disprove catastrophism he
failed to clearly see that species, as we style them, became extinct,
though really the changes in the species practically amounted to
extinctions of the earlier species as such. The little that was known
to Lamarck at the time he wrote, prevented his knowing that species
became extinct, as we say, or recognizing the fact that while some
species, genera, and even orders may rise, culminate, and die, others
are modified, while a few persist from one period to another. He did,
however, see clearly that, taking plant and animal life as a whole, it
underwent a slow modification, the later forms being the descendants of
the earlier; and this truth is the central one of modern palæontology.
Lamarck's first memoir on fossil shells, in which he described many new
species, was published in 1802, after the appearance of his
_Hydrogéologie_, to which he refers. It was the first of a series of
descriptive papers, which appeared at intervals from 1802 to 1806. He
does not fail to open the series of memoirs with some general remarks,
which prove his broad, philosophic spirit, that characterizing the
founder of a new science. He begins by saying that the fossil forms have
their analogues in the tropical seas. He claims that there was evident
proof that these molluscs could not have lived in a climate like that of
places in which they now occur, instancing _Nautilius pompilius_, which
now lives in the seas of warm countries; also the presence of exotic
ferns, palms, fossil amber, fossil gum elastic, besides the occurrence
of fossil crocodiles and elephants both in France and Germany.[83]
Hence there have been changes of climate since these forms flourished,
and, he adds, the intervals between these changes of climate were
stationary periods, whose duration was practically without limit. He
assigns a duration to these stationary 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,[84] 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 Brander'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 and their relations to
geology may be seen in his later memoirs, _Sur les Fossiles des environs
de Paris_.[85]
"The determination of the characters, both generic and specific, of
animals of which we find the fossil remains in almost all the dry
parts of the continents and large islands of our globe will be, from
several points of view, a thing extremely useful to the progress of
natural history. At the outset, the more this determination is
advanced, the more will it tend to complete our knowledge in regard
to the species which exist in nature and of those which have
existed, as it is true that some of them have been lost, as we have
reason to believe, at least as concerns the large animals. Moreover,
this same determination will be singularly advantageous for the
advancement of geology; for the fossil remains in question may be
considered, from their nature, their condition, and their situation,
as authentic monuments of the revolutions which the surface of our
globe has undergone, and they can throw a strong light on the nature
and character of these revolutions."
This series of papers on the fossils of the Paris tertiary basin
extended through the first eight volumes of the _Annales_, and were
gathered into a volume published in 1806. In his descriptions his work
was comparative, the fossil species being compared with their living
representatives. The thirty plates, containing 483 figures representing
184 species (exclusive of those figured by Brard), were afterwards
published, with the explanations, but not the descriptions, as a
separate volume in 1823.[86] This (the text published in 1806) is the
first truly scientific palæontological work ever published, preceding
Cuvier's _Ossemens fossiles_ by six years.
When we consider Lamarck's--at his time unrivalled--knowledge of
molluscs, his philosophical treatment of the relations of the study of
fossils to geology, his correlation of the tertiary beds of England with
those of France, and his comparative descriptions of the fossil forms
represented by the existing shells, it seems not unreasonable to regard
him as the founder of invertebrate palæontology, as Cuvier was of
vertebrate or mammalian palæontology.
We have entered the claim that Lamarck was one of the chief founders of
palæontology, and the first French author of a genuine, detailed
palæontological treatise. It must be admitted, therefore, that the
statement generally made that Cuvier was the founder of this science
should be somewhat modified, though he may be regarded as the chief
founder of vertebrate palæontology.
In this field, however, Cuvier had his precursors not only in Germany
and Holland, but also in France.
Our information as to the history of the rise of vertebrate palæontology
is taken from Blainville's posthumous work entitled _Cuvier et Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire_.[87] In this work, a severe critical and perhaps not
always sufficiently appreciative account of Cuvier's character and work,
we find an excellent history of the first beginnings of vertebrate
palæontology. Blainville has little or nothing to say of the first steps
in invertebrate palæontology, and, singularly enough, not a word of
Lamarck's principles and of his papers and works on fossil shells--a
rather strange oversight, because he was a friend and admirer of
Lamarck, and succeeded him in one of the two departments of
invertebrates created at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle after Lamarck's
death.
Blainville, who by the way was the first to propose the word
_palæontology_, shows that the study of the great extinct mammals had
for forty years been held in great esteem in Germany, before Faujas and
Cuvier took up the subject in France. Two Frenchmen, also before 1789,
had examined mammalian bones. Thus Bernard de Jussieu knew of the
existence in a fossil state of the teeth of the hippopotamus.
Guettard[88] published in 1760 a memoir on the fossil bones of Aix en
Provence. Lamanon (1780-1783)[89] in a beautiful memoir described a
head, almost entire, found in the gypsum beds of Paris. Daubenton had
also slightly anticipated Cuvier's law of correlation, giving "a very
remarkable example of the mode of procedure to follow in order to solve
these kinds of questions by the way in which he had recognized a bone of
a giraffe whose skeleton he did not possess" (De Blainville).
"But it was especially in Germany, in the hands of Pallas, Camper,
Blumenbach, anatomists and physicians, also those of Walch, Merck,
Hollmann, Esper, Rosenmüller, and Collini (who was not, however,
occupied with natural history), of Beckman, who had even discussed
the subject in a general way (_De reductione rerum fossilium ad
genera naturalia prototyporum--Nov. Comm. Soc. Scient.
Goettingensis_, t. ii.), that palæontology applied to quadrupeds had
already settled all that pertained to the largest species."
As early as 1764, Hollmann[90] had admirably identified the bones of a
rhinoceros found in a bone-deposit of the Hartz, although he had no
skeleton of this animal for comparison.
Pallas, in a series of memoirs dating from 1773, had discovered and
distinguished the species of Siberian elephant or mammoth, the
rhinoceros, and the large species of oxen and buffalo whose bones were
found in such abundance in the quaternary deposits of Siberia; and, as
Blainville says, if he did not distinguish the species, it was because
at this epoch the question of the distinction of the two species of
rhinoceros and of elephants, in the absence of material, could not be
solved. This solution, however, was made by the Dutch anatomist Camper,
in 1777, who had brought together at Amsterdam a collection of skeletons
and skulls of the existing species which enabled him for the first time
to make the necessary comparisons between the extinct and living
species. A few years later (1780) Blumenbach confirmed Camper's
identification, and gave the name of _Elephas primigenius_ to the
Siberian mammoth.
"Beckman" [says Blainville] "as early as 1772 had even published a
very good memoir on the way in which we should consider fossil
organic bodies; he was also the first to propose using the name
_fossilia_ instead of _petrefacta_, and to name the science which
studies fossils _Oryctology_. It was also he who admitted that these
bodies should be studied with reference to the class, order, genus,
species, as we would do with a living being, and he compared them,
which he called _prototypes_,[91] with their analogues. He then
passes in review, following the zoölogical order, the fossils which
had been discovered by naturalists. He even described one of them as
a new species, besides citing, with an erudition then rare, all the
authors and all the works where they were described. He did no more
than to indicate but not name each species. Thus he was the means of
soon producing a number of German authors who made little advance
from lack of anatomical knowledge; but afterwards the task fell into
the hands of men capable of giving to the newly created palæontology
a remarkable impulse, and one which since then has not abated."
Blumenbach,[92] the most eminent and all-round German anatomist and
physiologist of his time, one of the founders of anthropology as well as
of palæontology, had meanwhile established the fact that there were two
species of fossil cave-bear, which he named _Ursus spelæus_ and _U.
arctoideus_. He began to publish his _Archæologia telluris_,[93] the
first part of which appeared in 1803.
From Blainville's useful summary we learn that Blumenbach, mainly
limiting his work to the fossils of Hanover, aimed at studying fossils
in order to explain the revolutions of the earth.
"Hence the order he proposed to follow was not that commonly
followed in treatises on oryctology, namely, systematic, following
the classes and the orders of the animal and vegetable kingdom, but
in a chronological order, in such a way as to show that the classes,
so far as it was possible to conjecture with any probability, were
established after or in consequence of the different revolutions of
the earth.
"Thus, as we see, all the great questions, more or less insoluble,
which the study of fossil organic bodies can offer, were raised and
even discussed by the celebrated professor of Göttingen as early as
1803, before anything of the sort could have arisen from the essays
of M. G. Cuvier; the errors of distribution in the classes committed
by Blumenbach were due to the backward state of geology."
The political troubles of Germany, which also bore heavily upon the
University of Göttingen, probably brought Blumenbach's labors to an end,
for after a second "specimen" of his work, of less importance than the
first, the _Archæologia telluris_ was discontinued.
The French geologist Faujas,[94] who also published several articles on
fossil animals, ceased his labors, and now Cuvier began his memorable
work.
The field of the labors and triumphs of palæontology were now
transferred to France. We have seen that the year 1793, when Lamarck and
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire were appointed to fill the new zoölogical chairs,
and the latter had in 1795 called Cuvier from Normandy to Paris, was a
time of renascence of the natural sciences in France. Cuvier began a
course of lectures on comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural
History. He was more familiar than any one else in France with the
progress in natural science in Germany, and had felt the stimulus
arising from this source; besides, as Blainville stated, he was also
impelled by the questions boldly raised by Faujas in his geological
lectures, who was somewhat of the school of Buffon. Cuvier, moreover,
had at his disposition the collection of skeletons of the Museum, which
was frequently increased by those of the animals which died in the
menagerie. With his knowledge of comparative anatomy, of which, after
Vicq-d'Azyr, he was the chief founder, and with the gypsum quarry of
Montmartre, that rich cemetery of tertiary mammals, to draw from, he had
the whole field before him, and rapidly built up his own vast
reputation and thus added to the glory of France.
His first contribution to palæontology[95] appeared in 1798, in which he
announced his intention of publishing an extended work on fossil bones
of quadrupeds, to restore the skeletons and to compare them with those
now living, and to determine their relations and differences; but, says
Blainville, in the list of thirty or forty species which he enumerates
in his tableau, none was apparently discovered by him, unless it was the
species of "dog" of Montmartre, which he afterward referred to his new
genera Palæotherium and Anaplotherium. In 1801 (le 26 brumaire, an IX.)
he published, by order of the Institut, the programme of a work on
fossil quadrupeds, with an increased number of species; but, as
Blainville states, "It was not until 1804, and in tome iii. of the
_Annales du Muséum_, namely, more than three years after his programme,
that he began his publications by fragments and without any order, while
these publications lasted more than eight years before they were
collected into a general work"; this "_corps d'ouvrage_" being the
_Ossemens fossiles_, which was issued in 1812 in four quarto volumes,
with an atlas of plates.
It is with much interest, then, that we turn to Cuvier's great work,
which brought him such immediate and widespread fame, in order to see
how he treated his subject. His general views are contained in the
preliminary remarks in his well-known "Essay on the Theory of the Earth"
(1812), which was followed in 1821 by his _Discours sur les Révolutions
de la Surface du Globe_.
It was written in a more attractive and vigorous style than the writings
of Lamarck, more elegant, concise, and with less repetition, but it is
destitute of the philosophic grasp, and is not the work of a profound
thinker, but rather of a man of talent who was an industrious collector
and accurate describer of fossil bones, of a high order to be sure, but
analytical rather than synthetical, of one knowing well the value of
carefully ascertained and demonstrated facts, but too cautious, if he
was by nature able to do so, to speculate on what may have seemed to him
too few facts. It is also the work of one who fell in with the current
views of the time as to the general bearing of his discoveries on
philosophy and theology, believing as he did in the universality of the
Noachian deluge.
Like Lamarck, Cuvier independently made use of the comparative method,
the foundation method in palæontology; and Cuvier's well-known "law of
correlation of structures," so well exemplified in the vertebrates, was
a fresh, new contribution to philosophical biology.
In his _Discours_, speaking of the difficulty of determining the bones
of fossil quadrupeds, as compared with fossil shells or the remains of
fishes, he remarks:[96]
"Happily comparative anatomy possessed a principle which, well
developed, was capable of overcoming every difficulty; it was that
of the correlation of forms in organic beings, by means of which
each kind of organism can with exactitude be recognized by every
fragment of each of its parts.--Every organized being," he adds,
"forms an entire system, unique and closed, whose organs mutually
correspond, and concur in the same definite action by a reciprocal
reaction. Hence none of these parts can change without the other
being also modified, and consequently each of them, taken
separately, indicates and produces (_donne_) all the others.
"A claw, a shoulder-blade, a condyle, a leg or arm-bone, or any
other bone separately considered, enables us to discover the kind of
teeth to which they have belonged; so also reciprocally we may
determine the form of the other bones from the teeth. Thus,
commencing our investigation by a careful survey of any one bone by
itself, a person who is sufficiently master of the laws of organic
structure can reconstruct the entire animal. The smallest facet of
bone, the smallest apophysis, has a determinate character, relative
to the class, the order, the genus, and the species to which it
belongs, so that even when one has only the extremity of a
well-preserved bone, he can, with careful examination, assisted by
analogy and exact comparison, determine all these things as surely
as if he had before him the entire animal."
Cuvier adds that he has enjoyed every kind of advantage for such
investigations owing to his fortunate situation in the Museum of Natural
History, and that by assiduous researches for nearly thirty years[97]
he has collected skeletons of all the genera and sub-genera of
quadrupeds, with those of many species in certain genera, and several
individuals of certain species. With such means it was easy for him to
multiply his comparisons, and to verify in all their details the
applications of his laws.
Such is the famous law of correlation of parts, of Cuvier. It could be
easily understood by the layman, and its enunciation added vastly to the
popular reputation and prestige of the young science of comparative
anatomy.[98] In his time, and applied to the forms occurring in the
Paris Basin, it was a most valuable, ingenious, and yet obvious method,
and even now is the principal rule the palæontologist follows in
identifying fragments of fossils of any class. But it has its
limitations, and it goes without saying that the more complete the
fossil skeleton of a vertebrate, or the remains of an arthropod, the
more complete will be our conception of the form of the extinct
organism. It may be misleading in the numerous cases of convergence and
of generalized forms which now abound in our palæontological
collections. We can well understand how guarded one must be in working
out the restorations of dinosaurs and fossil birds, of the Permian and
Triassic theromorphs, and the Tertiary creodonts as compared with
existing carnivora.
As the late O. C. Marsh[99] observed:
"We know to-day that unknown extinct animals cannot be restored from
a single tooth or claw unless they are very similar to forms already
known. Had Cuvier himself applied his methods to many forms from
the early tertiary or older formations he would have failed. If, for
instance, he had had before him the disconnected fragments of an
eocene tillodont he would undoubtedly have referred a molar tooth to
one of his pachyderms, an incisor tooth to a rodent, and a claw bone
to a carnivore. The tooth of a Hesperornis would have given him no
possible hint of the rest of the skeleton, nor its swimming feet the
slightest clue to the ostrich-like sternum or skull. And yet the
earnest belief in his own methods led Cuvier to some of his most
important discoveries."
Let us now examine from Cuvier's own words in his _Discours_, not
relying on the statements of his expositors or followers, just what he
taught notwithstanding the clear utterances of his older colleague,
Lamarck, whose views he set aside and either ignored or ridiculed.[100]
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
He at the outset affirms that nature has, like mankind, also had her
intestine wars, and that "the surface of the globe has been much
convulsed by successive revolutions and various catastrophes."
As first proof of the revolutions on the surface of the earth he
instances fossil shells, which in the lowest and most level parts of the
earth are "almost everywhere in such a perfect state of preservation
that even the smallest of them retain their most delicate parts, their
sharpest ridges, and their finest and tenderest processes."
"We are therefore forcibly led to believe not only that the sea has
at one period or another covered all our plains, but that it must
have remained there for a long time and in a state of tranquillity,
which circumstance was necessary for the formation of deposits so
extensive, so thick, in part so solid, and filled with the exuviæ of
aquatic animals."
But the traces of revolutions become still more marked when we ascend a
little higher and approach nearer to the foot of the great mountain
chains. Hence the strata are variously inclined, and at times vertical,
contain shells differing specifically from those of beds on the plains
below, and are covered by horizontal later beds. Thus the sea, previous
to the formation of the horizontal strata, had formed others, which by
some means have been broken, lifted up, and overturned in a thousand
ways. There had therefore been also at least one change in the basin of
that sea which preceded ours; it had also experienced at least one
revolution.
He then gives proofs that such revolutions have been numerous.
"Thus the great catastrophes which have produced revolutions in the
basins of the sea were preceded, accompanied, and followed by
changes in the nature of the fluid and of the substances which it
held in solution, and when the surface of the seas came to be
divided by islands and projecting ridges, different changes took
place in every separate basin."
We now come to the Cuvierian doctrine _par excellence_, one in which he
radically differs from Lamarck's views as to the genetic relations
between the organisms of successive strata.
"Amid these changes of the general fluid it must have been almost
impossible for the same kind of animals to continue to live, nor did
they do so in fact. Their species, and even their genera, change
with the strata, and although the same species occasionally recur at
small distances, it is generally the case that the shells of the
ancient strata have forms peculiar to themselves; that they
gradually disappear till they are not to be seen at all in the
recent strata, still less in the existing seas, in which, indeed, we
never discover their corresponding species, and where several even
of their genera are not to be found; that, on the contrary, the
shells of the recent strata resemble, as regards the genus, those
which still exist in the sea, and that in the last formed and
loosest of these strata there are some species which the eye of the
most expert naturalists cannot distinguish from those which at
present inhabit the ocean.
"In animal nature, therefore, there has been a succession of changes
corresponding to those which have taken place in the chemical nature
of the fluid; and when the sea last receded from our continent its
inhabitants were not very different from those which it still
continues to support."
He then refers to successive irruptions and retreats of the sea, "the
final result of which, however, has been a universal depression of the
level of the sea."
"These repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither been
slow nor gradual; most of the catastrophes which have occasioned
them have been sudden."
He then adds his proofs of the occurrence of revolutions before the
existence of living beings. Like Lamarck, Cuvier was a Wernerian, and in
speaking of the older or primitive crystalline rocks which contain no
vestige of fossils, he accepted the view of the German theorist in
geology, that granites forming the axis of mountain chains were formed
in a fluid.
We must give Cuvier the credit of fully appreciating the value of
fossils as being what he calls "historical documents," also for
appreciating the fact that there were a number of revolutions marking
either the incoming or end of a geological period; but as he failed to
perceive the unity of organization in organic beings, and their genetic
relationship, as had been indicated by Lamarck and by Geoffroy
St. Hilaire, so in geological history he did not grasp, as did Lamarck,
the vast extent of geological time, and the general uninterrupted
continuity of geological events. He was analytic, thoroughly believing
in the importance of confining himself to the discovery of facts, and,
considering the multitude of fantastic hypotheses and suggestions of
previous writers of the eighteenth century, this was sound, sensible,
and thoroughly scientific. But unfortunately he did not stop here.
Master of facts concerning the fossil mammals of the Paris Basin, he
also--usually cautious and always a shrewd man of the world--fell into
the error of writing his "theory of the world," and of going to the
extreme length of imagining universal catastrophes where there are but
local ones, a universal Noachian deluge when there was none, and of
assuming that there were at successive periods thoroughgoing total and
sudden extinctions of life, and as sudden recreations. 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 imagination; 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
disdainfully 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
_Règne Animal_, was a Cuvierian, and down to the time of Lyell and of
Charles Darwin all naturalists, with only here and there an exception,
were pronounced Cuvierians in biology and geology--catastrophists 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 physical geography, which
reacted on the life-forms, rendering certain ones extinct, and modifying
others; but this conception is entirely distinct from the views of
Cuvier and his school,[101] which may, in the light of our present
knowledge, properly be deemed not only totally inadequate, but childish
and fantastic.
Cuvier cites the view of Dolomieu, the well-known geologist and
mineralogist (1770-1801), only, however, to reject it, who went to the
extent of supposing that "tides of seven or eight hundred fathoms have
carried off from time to time the bottom of the ocean, throwing it up in
mountains and hills on the primitive valleys and plains of the
continents" (Dolomieu in _Journal de Physique_).
Cuvier met with objections to his extreme views. In his discourse he
thus endeavors to answer "the following objection" which "has already
been stated against my conclusions":
"Why may not the non-existing races of mammiferous land quadrupeds
be mere modifications or varieties of those ancient races which we
now find in the fossil state, which modifications may have been
produced by change of climate and other local circumstances, and
since raised to the present excessive differences by the operation
of similar causes during a long succession of ages?
"This objection may appear strong to those who believe in the
indefinite possibility of change of forms in organized bodies, and
think that during a succession of ages, and by alternations of
habits, all the species may change into each other, or one of them
give birth to all the rest. Yet to these persons the following
answer may be given from their own system: If the species have
changed by degrees, as they assume, we ought to find traces of this
gradual modification. Thus, between the Palæotherium and the species
of our own days, we should be able to discover some intermediate
forms; and yet no such discovery has ever been made. Since the
bowels of the earth have not preserved monuments of this strange
genealogy, we have a right to conclude that the ancient and now
extinct species were as permanent in their forms and characters as
those which exist at present; or, at least, that the catastrophe
which destroyed them did not have sufficient time for the production
of the changes that are alleged to have taken place."
Cuvier thus emphatically rejects all idea that any of the tertiary
mammals could have been the ancestral forms of those now existing.
"From all these well-established facts, there does not seem to be
the smallest foundation for supposing that the new genera which I
have discovered or established among extraneous fossils, such as the
_palæotherium_, _anaplotherium_, _megalonynx_, _mastodon_,
_pterodactylis_, etc., have ever been the sources of any of our
present animals, which only differ as far as they are influenced by
time or climate. Even if it should prove true, which I am far from
believing to be the case, that the fossil elephants, rhinoceroses,
elks, and bears do not differ further from the present existing
species of the same genera than the present races of dogs differ
among themselves, this would by no means be a sufficient reason to
conclude that they were of the same species; since the races or
varieties of dogs have been influenced by the trammels of
domestication, which these other animals never did and indeed never
could experience."[102]
The extreme views of Cuvier as to the frequent renewal and extinction of
life were afterward (in 1850) carried out to an exaggerated extent by
D'Orbigny, who maintained that the life of the earth must have become
extinct and again renewed twenty-seven times. Similar views were held by
Agassiz, who, however, maintained the geological succession of animals
and the parallelism between their embryonic development and geological
succession, the two foundation stones of the biogenetic law of Haeckel.
But immediately after the publication of Cuvier's _Ossemens fossiles_,
as early as 1813, Von Schlotheim, the founder of vegetable palæontology,
refused to admit that each set of beds was the result of such a
thoroughgoing revolution.[103]
At a later date Bronn "demonstrated that certain species indeed really
passed from one formation to another, and though stratigraphic
boundaries are often barriers confining the persistence of some form,
still this is not an absolute rule, since the species in nowise appear
in their entirety."[104] At present the persistence of genera like
Saccamina, Lingula, Ceratodus, etc., from one age to another, or even
through two or more geological ages, is well known, while _Atrypa
reticulatus_, a species of world-wide distribution, lived from near the
beginning of the Upper Silurian to the Waverly or beginning of the
Carboniferous age.
Such were the views of the distinguished founder of vertebrate
palæontology. When we compare the _Hydrogéologie_ of Lamarck with
Cuvier's _Discours_, we see, though some erroneous views, some very
fantastic conceptions are held, in common with others of his time, in
regard to changes of level of the land and the origin of the crystalline
rocks, that it did contain the principles upon which modern palæontology
is founded, while those of Cuvier are now in the limbo--so densely
populated--of exploded, ill-founded theories.
Our claim that Lamarck should share with Cuvier the honor of being a
founder of palæontology[105] is substantiated by the philosophic Lyell,
who as early as 1836, in his _Principles of Geology_, expresses the same
view in the following words: "The labors of Cuvier in comparative
osteology, and of Lamarck in recent and fossil shells, had raised these
departments of study to a rank of which they had never previously been
deemed susceptible."
Our distinguished American palæontologist, the late O. C. Marsh, takes
the same view, and draws the following parallel between the two great
French naturalists:
"In looking back from this point of view, the philosophical breadth
of Lamarck's conclusions, in comparison with those of Cuvier, is
clearly evident. The invertebrates on which Lamarck worked offered
less striking evidence of change than the various animals
investigated by Cuvier; yet they led Lamarck directly to evolution,
while Cuvier ignored what was before him on this point, and rejected
the proof offered by others. Both pursued the same methods, and had
an abundance of material on which to work, yet the facts observed
induced Cuvier to believe in catastrophes, and Lamarck in the
uniform course of nature. Cuvier declared species to be permanent;
Lamarck, that they were descended from others. Both men stand in the
first rank in science; but Lamarck was the prophetic genius, half a
century in advance of his time."[106]
FOOTNOTES:
[81] Although Defrance (born 1759, died in 1850) aided Lamarck in
collecting tertiary shells, his earliest palæontological paper (on
Hipponyx) did not appear until the year 1819.
[82] In a footnote Lamarck refers to an unpublished work, which probably
formed a part of the _Hydrogéologie_, published in the following year.
"_Voyez à ce sujet mon ouvrage intitulé: De l'influence du mouvement des
eaus sur la surface du globe terrestre, et des indices du déplacement
continuel du bassin des mers, ainsi que de son transport successif sur
les différens points de la surface du globe_" (no date).
[83] It should be stated that the first observer to inaugurate the
comparative method was that remarkable forerunner of modern
palæontologists, Steno the Dane, who was for a while a professor at
Padua. In 1669, in his treatise entitled _De Solido intra Solidum
naturaliter contento_, which Lyell translates "On gems, crystals, and
organic petrefactions inclosed within solid rocks," he showed, by
dissecting a shark from the Mediterranean, that certain fossil teeth
found in Tuscany were also those of some shark. "He had also compared
the shells discovered in the Italian strata with living species, pointed
out their resemblance, and traced the various gradations from shells
merely calcined, or which had only lost their animal gluten, to those
petrefactions in which there was a perfect substitution of stony matter"
(Lyell's _Principles_, p. 25). About twenty years afterwards, the
English philosopher Robert Hooke, in a discourse on earthquakes, written
in 1688, but published posthumously in 1705, was aware that the fossil
ammonites, nautili, and many other shells and fossil skeletons found in
England, were of different species from any then known; but he doubted
whether the species had become extinct, observing that the knowledge of
naturalists of all the marine species, especially those inhabiting the
deep sea, was very deficient. In some parts of his writings, however, he
leans to the opinion that species had been lost. Some species, he
observes with great sagacity, "are _peculiar to certain places_, and not
to be found elsewhere." Turtles and such large ammonites as are found in
Portland seem to have been the productions of hotter countries, and he
thought that England once lay under the sea within the torrid zone
(Lyell's _Principles_).
Gesner the botanist, of Zurich, also published in 1758 an excellent
treatise on petrefactions and the changes of the earth which they
testify. He observed that some fossils, "such as ammonites, gryphites,
belemnites, and other shells, are either of unknown species or found
only in the Indian and other distant seas" (Lyell's _Principles_).
Geikie estimates very highly Guettard's labors in palæontology, saying
that "his descriptions and excellent drawings entitle him to rank as the
first great leader of the palæontological school of France." He
published many long and elaborate memoirs containing brief descriptions,
but without specific names, and figured some hundreds of fossil shells.
He was the first to recognize trilobites (Illænus) in the Silurian
slates of Angers, in a memoir published in 1762. Some of his generic
names, says Geikie, "have passed into the languages of modern
palæontology," and one of the genera of chalk sponges which he
described has been named after him, _Guettardia_. In his memoir "On the
accidents that have befallen fossil shells compared with those which are
found to happen to shells now living in the sea" (Trans. Acad. Roy.
Sciences, 1765, pp. 189, 329, 399) he shows that the 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."
[84] Scheuchzer's "Complaint and Vindication of the Fishes" (_Piscium
Querelae et Vindiciae_, Germany, 1708), "a work of zoölogical merit, in
which he gave some good plates and descriptions of fossil fish" (Lyell).
Gesner's treatise on petrefactions 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).
[85] _Annales du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle_, vi., 1805, pp. 222-228.
[86] _Recueil de Planches des Coquilles fossiles des environs de Paris_
(Paris, 1823). There are added two plates of fossil fresh-water shells
(twenty-one species of Limnæa, etc.) by Brard, with sixty-two figures.
[87] _Cuvier et Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Biographies scientifiques_, par
Ducrotay de Blainville (Paris, 1890, p. 446).
[88] "Mémoire sur des os fossiles découverts auprès de la ville d'Aix en
Provence" (Mém. Acad. Sc., Paris, 1760, pp. 209-220).
[89] "Sur un os d'une grosseur énorme qu'on a trouvé dans une couche de
glaise au milieu de Paris; et en général sur les ossemens fossiles qui
ont appartenu à de grands animaux" (_Journal de Physique_, tome xvii.,
1781. pp. 393-405). Lamanon also, in 1780, published in the same
_Journal_ an article on the nature and position of the bones found at
Aix en Provence; and in 1783 another article on the fossil bones
belonging to gigantic animals.
[90] Hollmann had still earlier published a paper entitled _De corporum
marinorum, aliorumque peregrinorum in terra continente origine_
(_Commentarii Soc. Goettingen._, tom. iii., 1753, pp. 285-374).
[91] _Novi Commentarii Soc. Sc. Goettingensis_, tom. ii., _Commentat._,
tom. i.
[92] His first palæontological article appears to have been one entitled
_Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Vorwelt_ (Lichtenberg, _Voigt's
Magaz._, Bd. vi., S. 4, 1790, pp. 1-17). I have been unable to ascertain
in which of his publications he describes and names the cave-bear.
[93] _Specimen archæologia telluris terrarumque imprimis Hannoveranæ_,
pts. i., ii. _Cum 4 tabl. aen. 4 maj._ Gottingæ, 1803.
[94] Faujas Saint-Fond wrote articles on fossil bones (1794); on fossil
plants both of France (1803) and of Monte Bolca (1820); on a fish from
Nanterre (1802) and a fossil turtle (1803); on two species of fossil ox,
whose skulls were found in Germany, France, and England (1803), and on
an elephant's tusk found in the volcanic tufa of Darbres (1803); on the
fossil shells of Mayence (1806); and on a new genus (_Clotho_) of
bivalve shells.
[95] _Sur les ossemens qui se trouvent dans le gyps de Montmartre_
(_Bulletin des sciences pour la Société philomatique_, tomes 1, 2, 1798,
pp. 154-155).
[96] The following account is translated from the fourth edition of the
_Ossemens fossiles_, vol. 1., 1834, also the sixth edition of the
_Discours_, separately published in 1830. It does not differ materially
from the first edition of the _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_,
translated by Jameson, and republished in New York, with additions by
Samuel L. Mitchell, in 1818.
[97] In the first edition of the _Théorie_ he says fifteen years,
writing in 1812. In the later edition he changed the number of years to
thirty.
[98] De Blainville is inclined to make light of Cuvier's law and of his
assumptions; and in his somewhat cynical, depreciatory way, says:
"Thus for the thirty years during which appeared the works of M. G.
Cuvier on fossil bones, under the most favorable circumstances, in a
kind of renascence of the science of organization of animals, then
almost effaced in France, aided by the richest osteological collections
which then existed in Europe, M. G. Cuvier passed an active and a
comparatively long life, in a region abounding in fossil bones, without
having established any other principle in osteology than a witticism
which he had been unable for a moment to take seriously himself, because
he had not yet investigated or sufficiently studied the science of
organization, which I even doubt, to speak frankly, if he ever did.
Otherwise, he would himself soon have perceived the falsity of his
assertion that a single facet of a bone was sufficient to reconstruct a
skeleton from the observation that everything is harmoniously correlated
in an animal. It is a great thing if the memory, aided by a strong
imagination, can thus pass from a bone to the entire skeleton, even in
an animal well known and studied even to satiety; but for an unknown
animal, there is no one except a man but slightly acquainted with the
anatomy of animals who could pretend to do it. It is not true anatomists
like Hunter, Camper, Pallas, Vicq-d'Azyr, Blumenbach, Soemmering, and
Meckel who would be so presuming, and M. G. Cuvier would have been
himself much embarrassed if he had been taken at his word, and besides
it is this assertion which will remain formulated in the mouths of the
ignorant, and which has already made many persons believe that it is
possible to answer the most difficult and often insoluble problems in
palæontology, without having made any preliminary study, with the aid of
dividers, and, on the other hand, discouraging the Blumenbachs and
Soemmerings from giving their attention to this kind of work."
Huxley has, _inter alia_, put the case in a somewhat similar way, to
show that the law should at least be applied with much caution to
unknown forms:
"Cuvier, in the _Discours sur les Révolutions de la Surface du Globe_,
strangely credits himself, and has ever since been credited by others,
with the invention of a new method of palæontological research. But if
you will turn to the _Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles_, and watch
Cuvier not speculating, but working, you will find that his method is
neither more nor less than that of Steno. If he was able to make his
famous prophecy from the jaw which lay upon the surface of a block of
stone to the pelvis which lay hidden in it, it was not because either he
or any one else knew, or knows, why a certain form of jaw is, as a rule,
constantly accompanied by the presence of marsupial bones, but simply
because experience has shown that these two structures are coördinated"
(_Science and Hebrew Tradition. Rise and Progress of Paleontology_ 1881,
p. 23).
[99] _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_ (1879).
[100] The following statement of Cuvier's views is taken from Jameson's
translation of the first _Essay on the Theory of the Earth_, "which
formed the introduction to his _Recherches sur les Ossemens fossiles_,"
the first edition of which appeared in 1812, or ten years after the
publication of the _Hydrogéologie_. The original I have not seen, but I
have compared Jameson's translation with the sixth edition of the
_Discours_ (1820).
[101] Cuvier, in speaking of these revolutions, "which have changed the
surface of our earth," correctly reasons that they must have excited a
more powerful action upon terrestrial quadrupeds than upon marine
animals. "As these revolutions," he says, "have consisted chiefly in
changes of the bed of the sea, and as the waters must have destroyed all
the quadrupeds which they reached if their irruption over the land was
general, they must have destroyed the entire class, or, if confined only
to certain continents at one time, they must have destroyed at least all
the species inhabiting these continents, without having the same effect
upon the marine animals. On the other hand, millions of aquatic animals
may have been left quite dry, or buried in newly formed strata or thrown
violently on the coasts, while their races may have been still preserved
in more peaceful parts of the sea, whence they might again propagate and
spread after the agitation of the water had ceased."
[102] _Discours_, etc. Sixth edition.
[103] Felix Bernard, _The Principles of Paleontology_, Paris, 1895,
translated by C. E. Brooks, edited by J. M. Clark, from 14th Annual
Report New York State Geologist, 1895, pp. 127-217 (p. 16). Bernard
gives no reference to the work in which Schlotheim expressed this
opinion. E. v. Schlotheim's first work, _Flora der Vorwelt_, appeared in
1804, entitled _Beschreibung merkwürdiger Kraüterabdrücke und
Pflanzenversteinerungen. Ein Beytrag zur Flora der Vorvelt._ I Abtheil.
Mit 14 Kpfrn. 4^o. Gotha, 1804. A later work was _Beyträge zur
Naturgeschichte der Versteinerungen in geognostischer Hinsicht_
(_Denkschrift d. k. Academie d. Wissenschaften zu München für den Jahren
1816 und 1817_. 8 Taf. München, 1819). He was followed in Germany by
Sternberg (_Versuch einer geognostischbotanischen Darstellung der Flora
der Vorvelt._ 1-8. 1811. Leipzig, 1820-38); and in France by A. T.
Brongniart, 1801-1876 (_Histoire des Végétaux fossiles_, 1828). These
were the pioneers in palæophytology.
[104] Bernard's _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_
(1879), p. 23.
[105] In his valuable and comprehensive _Geschichte der Geologie und
Paläontologie_ (1899), Prof. K. von Zittel, while referring to Lamarck's
works on the tertiary shells of Paris and his _Animaux sans Vertèbres_,
also giving a just and full account of his life, practically gives him
the credit of being one of the founders of invertebrate palæontology. He
speaks of him as "the reformer and founder of scientific conchology,"
and states that "he defined with wonderful acuteness the numerous genera
and species of invertebrate animals, and created thereby for the ten
years following an authoritative foundation." Zittel, however, does not
mention the _Hydrogéologie_. Probably so rare a book was overlooked by
the eminent German palæontologist.
[106] _History and Methods of Paleontological Discovery_ (1879), p. 23.