LAMARCK THE FOUNDER OF INVERTEBRATE PALAEONTOLOGY It was fortunate for palaeontology that the two greatest zooelogists of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Lamarck and Cuvier, lived in the Paris basin, a vast cemetery of corals, shells, and mammals; and not far from extensive deposits of cretaceous rocks packed with fossil invertebrates.

With their then unrivalled knowledge of recent or existing forms, they could restore the assemblages of extinct animals which peopled the cretaceous ocean, and more especially the tertiary seas and lakes.
Lamarck drew his supplies of tertiary shells from the tertiary beds situated within a radius of from twenty-five to thirty miles from the centre of Paris, and chiefly from the village of Grignon, about ten miles west of Paris, beyond Versailles, and still a rich collecting ground for the students of the Museum and Sorbonne.

He acknowledges the aid received from Defrance,[81] who had already collected at Grignon five hundred species of fossil shells, three-fourths of which, he says, had not then been described.
Lamarck's first essay ("_Sur les fossiles_") on fossils in general was published at the end of his _Systeme des Animaux sans Vertebres_ (pp.

401-411), in 1801, a year before the publication of the _Hydrogeologie_.

"I give the name _fossils_," he says, "to remains of living beings, changed by their long sojourn in the earth or under water, but whose forms and structure are still recognizable.
"From this point of view, the bones of vertebrate animals and the remains of testaceous molluscs, of certain crustacea, of many echinoderms, coral polyps, when after having been for a long time buried in the earth or hidden under the sea, will have undergone an alteration which, while changing their substance, has nevertheless destroyed neither their forms, their figures, nor the special features of their structures." He goes on to say that the animal parts having been destroyed, the shell remains, being composed of calcareous matter.