This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882 edition. Excerpt: ...the judicious Cuvier still yielded to the prevailing custom in publishing his ' Discoveries on the Earth's Eevolutions.' " Lamarck's merit was to have discovered that there had been no catastrophes, but that the gradual action of forces during thousands of ages accounted for the changes observable upon the face of the earth, better than any sudden and violent perturbations. ' Nature, ' he writes, ' has no difficulty on the score of time; she has it always at command; it is with her a boundless space in which she has room for the greatest as for the smallest operations.' He was the first to distinguish littoral from ocean fossils, but no one accepts his theory that oceans make their beds deeper owing to the action of the tides, and distribute themselves differently over the earth's surface without any change of level of the different parts of that surface. " Settling down to a single branch of science, in consequence of his professorship, Lamarck now devoted himself to the twofold labour of lecturing and classifying the collections at the museum. In 1802 he published his ' Considerations on the Organization of Living Bodies'; in 1809 his ' Philosophic Zoologique, ' a development of the 'Considerations'; and from 1816 to 1822 his Natural History of the invertebrate animals, in seven volumes. This is his great work, and, being entirely a work of description and classification, was received with the unanimous approbation of the scientific world. His ' Fossil Shells of the Neighbourhood of Paris'--a work in which his profound know-R ledge of existing shells enabled him to class with certainty the remains of forms that had disappeared thousands of ages ago--met also with a favourable reception. " Lamarck was fifty years old before he began to...