François Jules Pictet de la Rive

at Geneva in 1829, and pursued his studies for a short time at Paris, where under the influence of Georges Cuvier, de Blainville and others, he worked at natural history and comparative anatomy.

[1] He directed his attention to the fossils of his native country, more especially to those of the Cretaceous and Jurassic strata, and in 1854 he commenced the publication of his great work, Matériaux pour la paléontologie suisse, ou Recueil de monographies sur les fossiles du Jura et des Alpes..., a series of quarto memoirs, of which six were published (1854–1873).

In the first edition Pictet, while adopting the hypothesis of successive creations of species, admitted that some may have originated through the modification of pre-existing forms.

In his second edition (1853–1857) he enters further into the probable transformation of some species, and discusses the independence of certain faunas, which did not appear to have originated from the types which locally preceded them.

[1] Alfred Russel Wallace made notes on Pictet's Paleontology [3] and these have been suggested [4] as giving a structure for his 'Sarawak Law' paper of 1855 which contains the assertion that "Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species": this, omitting the word 'generally' is point 2 of Wallace's precis.