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 palaeontological 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[82] In a footnote Lamarck refers to an unpublished work, which probably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 _Hydrogeologie_, published in the following year.
"_Voyez a ce sujet mon ouvrage intitule: De l'influence du mouvement des
eaus sur la surface du globe terrestre, et des indices du deplacement
continuel du bassin des mers, ainsi que de son transport successif sur
les differens 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
palaeontologists, 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