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I.—Lamarck and Playfair: A Geological Retrospect of the Year 1802.1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2009

Archibald Geikie
Affiliation:
President of the Geological Society.

Extract

If Lamarck allowed his brilliant faculty of generalisation to lead him far astray in his opinions regarding the origin of rocks, he bad formed a saner judgment on the causes that have developed the present terrestrial topography. The first chapter of the “Hydrogéologie ” is devoted to a consideration of the natural results that arise from the circulation of water over the surface of the land. This subject, he remarks, affords less scope than any other for the exercise of the imagination in framing hypotheses, for it can be studied on a basis of facts which are generally familiar. Though the question required to be considered in his treatise and was capable of easy solution, yet it seemed to him to be novel, at least from a general point of view, and to have been previously neglected by physicists and naturalists. He appears to have formed his conclusions regarding it independently, and to have been unaware how far he had been anticipated by previous observers. It is singularthat he makes no allusion to the work of his distinguished fellow-countryman Desmarest, who some thirty years previously had demonstrated, from a prolouged and minute investigation of the volcanic history of Auvergne, that the valleys of that region have been excavated by the streams which flow in them. He does not refer to the enunciation of the same doctrine by De Saussure a few years later in regard to the valleys of the Alps, nor to the clear presentation of similar views by Hutton, whose system had been expounded to French readers by Desmarest. But though he was mistaken in supposing that the doctrine was novel, Lamarck was not surpassed by any of his predecessors in the firmness with which he espoused it, and in the clearness with which he presented it to the world.

Type
Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1906

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Footnotes

1

An address delivered before the “Alliance Française” in the Sorbonne, Paris, on 26th February, 1906

References

page 194 note 1 He not improbably had Cuvier in his mind, who held this opinion and afterwards gave it prominence in his “Discours sur les Réevolutions de la Surface du Globe,” wherein he asserted that the occurrence of such a catastrophe, some 6,000 years ago, was one of the best ascertained facts in geology.

page 200 note 1 Playfair's examination of the specimens from Port Rush was made in company with Lord Webb Seymour and Sir James Hall (“Illustrations,” §253).