The invertebrates on which Lamarck worked offered less striking evidence of change than the various animals investigated by Cuvier; yet they led Lamarck directly to evolution, while Cuvier ignored what was before him on this point, and rejected the proof offered by others.

Both pursued the same methods, and had an abundance of material on which to work, yet the facts observed induced Cuvier to believe in catastrophes, and Lamarck in the uniform course of nature.

Cuvier declared species to be permanent; Lamarck, that they were descended from others.

Both men stand in the first rank in science; but Lamarck was the prophetic genius, half a century in advance of his time."[106] FOOTNOTES: [81] Although Defrance (born 1759, died in 1850) aided Lamarck in collecting tertiary shells, his earliest palaeontological paper (on Hipponyx) did not appear until the year 1819.
[82] In a footnote Lamarck refers to an unpublished work, which probably formed a part of the _Hydrogeologie_, published in the following year.
"_Voyez a ce sujet mon ouvrage intitule: De l'influence du mouvement des eaus sur la surface du globe terrestre, et des indices du deplacement continuel du bassin des mers, ainsi que de son transport successif sur les differens points de la surface du globe_" (no date).
[83] It should be stated that the first observer to inaugurate the comparative method was that remarkable forerunner of modern palaeontologists, Steno the Dane, who was for a while a professor at Padua.

In 1669, in his treatise entitled _De Solido intra Solidum naturaliter contento_, which Lyell translates "On gems, crystals, and organic petrefactions inclosed within solid rocks," he showed, by dissecting a shark from the Mediterranean, that certain fossil teeth found in Tuscany were also those of some shark.