widely read, and
passed through many editions. On the other hand, the _Hydrogeologie_
died stillborn, with scarcely a friend or a reader, never reaching a
second edition, and is now, like most of his works, a bibliographical
rarity.

The only writer who has said a word in its favor, or contrasted it with
the work of Cuvier, is the judicious and candid Huxley, who, though by
no means favorable to Lamarck's factors of evolution, frankly said:

"The vast authority of Cuvier was employed in support of the
traditionally respectable hypotheses of special creation and of
catastrophism; and the wild speculations of the _Discours sur les
Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_ were held to be models of sound
scientific thinking, while the really much more sober and
philosophic hypotheses of the _Hydrogeologie_ were scouted."[60]

Before summarizing the contents of this book, let us glance at the
geological atmosphere--thin and tenuous as it was then--in which Lamarck
lived. The credit of being the first observer, before Steno (1669), to
state that fossils are the remains of animals which were once alive, is
due to an Italian, Frascatero, of Verona, who wrote in 1517.

"But," says Lyell,[61] "the clear and philosophical views of
Frascatero were disregarded, and the talent and argumentative powers
of the learned were doomed for three centuries to be wasted in the
discussion of these two simple and preliminary questions: First,
whether fossil remains had ever belonged to living creatures; and,
secondly, whether, if this be admitted, all the phenomena could not
be explained by the deluge of Noah."

Previous to this the great artist, architect, engineer, and musician,
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who, among other great works, planned and
executed some navigable canals in Northern Italy, and who was an
observer of rare penetration and judgment, saw how fossil shells were
formed, saying that the mud of rivers had covered and penetrated into
the interior of fossil shells at a time when these were still at the
bottom of the sea near the coast.[62]

That versatile and observing genius, Bernard Palissy, as early as 1580,
in a book entitled _The Origin of Springs from Rain-water_, and in other
writings, criticized the notions of the time, especially of Italian
writers, that petrified shells had all been left by the universal
deluge.

"It has happened," said Fontenelle, in his eulogy on Palissy,
delivered