From the end of the eighteenth century, fossils became to be recognized as an important tool for the investigation of the "history" of nature. In the writings of Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (1741-1819), Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck (1744-1829), and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the importance of fossils for the interpretation of the past of the earth was repeatedly argued, and it also reflected their recognition about the origin and meaning of fossils themselves. According to Michel Foucault, it was Cuvier who decisively revealed the historicity in fossils, and led people into the search of the history of nature hidden in fossils through his incisive anatomical knowledge on animals. But Foucault's expression of Cuvier's achievement as being like breaking jars, in which the "historicity" of nature had been hidden as a form of the invisible functional dimension of the animal, is rather misleading. This paper aims to describe some aspects of the eighteenth-century French natural historians' notions and researches about fossils through my brief reading on some of the representative writings of fossils. Monographical writings by Antoine de Jussieu (1686-1758), René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683-1758), Pierre-Augustine Boissier de Sauvages (1710-1795), Jean-Etienne Guettard (1715-1786), Faujas, and Lamarck will be briefly introduced, and some rather anachronistic notes on Cuvier's achievement will be added.