re 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 practi