104 LOUIS AGASSfZ. [CHAP. xvm. 



Danvin's essay was rather limited. Besides Lyell and 

 Wallace (then at Ternate, Molucca Isles), who accepted 

 the new doctrine with reservations, there were only 

 the botanist, Sir Joseph D. Hooker, the anatomist and 

 essayist, Thomas H. Huxley, and two entomologists, 

 H. \V. Bates and Sir John Lubbock, who could be called, 

 from the first, friends of the theory of the descent and 

 modification of species according to Darwin's views. 

 All the English pahrnntologists, with Sir Richard 

 Owen at their head, were opposed to it; and not long 

 after the appearance of the " small green-covered book," 

 as it is called by Huxley, Owen in his library, at the 

 Sheen Lodge, Richmond Park, used to make fun of 

 Darwin's modification of species under domestication ; 

 and pointing to his pet clog, as he tried to catch flies, 

 he would say, " My dog is in the act of becoming one 

 of the insectivora." 1 



Darwin's old teacher at the Cambridge University, 

 Professor Adam Sedgwick, was anything but pleased 

 on receiving a presentation copy of the " Origin of 

 Species," which he read " with more pain than pleas- 



1 Attempts have been made, not only to question the influence exerted 

 on Richard Owen by Cuvier, but to place Owen among the Darwinists, 

 and even to call him a precursor of Darwin in the much-controverted 

 question of " Natural Selection." Owen, like Agassiz, was truly a disciple 

 of Cuvier. Owen until the end of his life always uttered the name of 

 Cuvier "with grateful reverence"; and in 1883 he wrote to Georges 

 Frederic Cuvier, nephew of Georges and son of Frederic: "There are 

 fashions of thought as well as of dress. A somewhat prevailing one, to 

 which you allude, I have occasionally referred to as the Biologic con- 

 jeclurale ; but the science of living things which will endure is based on 

 the foundation of \\\e fails post tifs made known, with the true methods of 

 their discovery, in the immortal works of Georges Cuvier" ("The Life 

 of Richard Owen" by Rev. R. Owen, Vol. II., p. 249; 1894). 



