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.