Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work

by A. S. Packard

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.”