Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and WorkPackard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
History
Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work
Packard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Evolution (Biology); Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de, 1744-1829; Naturalists -- France -- Biography
"From all these well-established facts, there does not seem to be
the smallest foundation for supposing that the new genera which I
have discovered or established among extraneous fossils, such as the
_palæotherium_, _anaplotherium_, _megalonynx_, _mastodon_,
_pterodactylis_, etc., have ever been the sources of any of our
present animals, which only differ as far as they are influenced by
time or climate. Even if it should prove true, which I am far from
believing to be the case, that the fossil elephants, rhinoceroses,
elks, and bears do not differ further from the present existing
species of the same genera than the present races of dogs differ
among themselves, this would by no means be a sufficient reason to
conclude that they were of the same species; since the races or
varieties of dogs have been influenced by the trammels of
domestication, which these other animals never did and indeed never
could experience."[102]
The extreme views of Cuvier as to the frequent renewal and extinction of
life were afterward (in 1850) carried out to an exaggerated extent by
D'Orbigny, who maintained that the life of the earth must have become
extinct and again renewed twenty-seven times. Similar views were held by
Agassiz, who, however, maintained the geological succession of animals
and the parallelism between their embryonic development and geological
succession, the two foundation stones of the biogenetic law of Haeckel.
But immediately after the publication of Cuvier's _Ossemens fossiles_,
as early as 1813, Von Schlotheim, the founder of vegetable palæontology,
refused to admit that each set of beds was the result of such a
thoroughgoing revolution.[103]
At a later date Bronn "demonstrated that certain species indeed really
passed from one formation to another, and though stratigraphic
boundaries are often barriers confining the persistence of some form,
still this is not an absolute rule, since the species in nowise appear
in their entirety."[104] At present the persistence of genera like
Saccamina, Lingula, Ceratodus, etc., from one age to another, or even
through two or more geological ages, is well known, while _Atrypa
reticulatus_, a species of world-wide distribution, lived from near the
beginning of the Upper Silurian to the Waverly or beginning of the
Carboniferous age.
Such were the views of the distinguished founder of vertebrate
palæontology. When we compare the _Hydrogéologie_ of Lamarck with
Cuvier's _Discours_, we see, though some erroneous views, some very
fantastic conceptions are held, in common with others of his time, in
regard to changes of level of the land and the origin of the crystalline
rocks, that it did contain the principles upon which modern palæontology
is founded, while those of Cuvier are now in the limbo--so densely
populated--of exploded, ill-founded theories.
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