It appeared in 1802 (an X.), or ten years before the first publication of Cuvier's famous _Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_ (1812).

Written in his popular and attractive style, and thoroughly in accord with the cosmological and theological prepossessions of the age, the Discours was widely read, and passed through many editions.

On the other hand, the _Hydrogeologie_ died stillborn, with scarcely a friend or a reader, never reaching a second edition, and is now, like most of his works, a bibliographical rarity.
The only writer who has said a word in its favor, or contrasted it with the work of Cuvier, is the judicious and candid Huxley, who, though by no means favorable to Lamarck's factors of evolution, frankly said: "The vast authority of Cuvier was employed in support of the traditionally respectable hypotheses of special creation and of catastrophism; and the wild speculations of the _Discours sur les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_ were held to be models of sound scientific thinking, while the really much more sober and philosophic hypotheses of the _Hydrogeologie_ were scouted."[60] Before summarizing the contents of this book, let us glance at the geological atmosphere--thin and tenuous as it was then--in which Lamarck lived.

The credit of being the first observer, before Steno (1669), to state that fossils are the remains of animals which were once alive, is due to an Italian, Frascatero, of Verona, who wrote in 1517.
"But," says Lyell,[61] "the clear and philosophical views of Frascatero were disregarded, and the talent and argumentative powers of the learned were doomed for three centuries to be wasted in the discussion of these two simple and preliminary questions: First, whether fossil remains had ever belonged to living creatures; and, secondly, whether, if this be admitted, all the phenomena could not be explained by the deluge of Noah." Previous to this the great artist, architect, engineer, and musician, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who, among other great works, planned and executed some navigable canals in Northern Italy, and who was an observer of rare penetration and judgment, saw how fossil shells were formed, saying that the mud of rivers had covered and penetrated into the interior of fossil shells at a time when these were still at the bottom of the sea near the coast.[62] That versatile and observing genius, Bernard Palissy, as early as 1580, in a book entitled _The Origin of Springs from Rain-water_, and in other writings, criticized the notions of the time, especially of Italian writers, that petrified shells had all been left by the universal deluge.
"It has happened," said Fontenelle, in his eulogy on Palissy, delivered before the French Academy a century and a half later, "that a potter who knew neither Latin nor Greek dared, toward the end of the sixteenth century, to say in Paris, and in the presence of all the doctors, that fossil shells were veritable shells deposited at some time by the sea in the places where they were then found; that the animals had given to the figured stones all their different shapes, and that he boldly defied all the school of Aristotle to attack his proofs."[63] Then succeeded, at the end of the seventeenth century, the forerunners of modern geology: Steno (1669), Leibnitz (1683), Ray (1692), Woodward (1695), Vallisneri (1721), while Moro published his views in 1745.

In the eighteenth century Reaumur[64] (1720) presented a paper on the fossil shells of Touraine.
Cuvier[65] thus pays his respects, in at least an unsympathetic way, to the geological essayists and compilers of the seventeenth century: "The end of the seventeenth century lived to see the birth of a new science, which took, in its infancy, the high-sounding name of 'Theory of the Earth.' Starting from a small number of facts, badly observed, connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it pretended to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play with them, and to create their history.