372 A SHORT HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



evidence in favor of organic evolution together with a plausible 

 explanation of the mechanism (natural selection) of its operation. 

 To this we shall return. In a century so rich and so varied in 

 its achievements in natural science as was the nineteenth, we 

 can obviously only touch and that very briefly upon a few 

 of the more important and fundamental. 



Of the remarkable progress of all the sciences during the 

 Victorian era, Huxley has given the best brief and general ac- 

 count in his essay entitled Advance of Science in the Last Half 

 Century (1887), prepared in celebration of the first fifty years 

 of the reign of Queen Victoria. 



PROGRESS IN ZOOLOGY. The work of Buffon and Linnaeus 

 in the field of biology and of Werner and Hutton and Smith in 

 that of geology has been referred to in Chapter XIV. Of these 

 only Werner (d. 1817) and Smith (d. 1839) lived on into the nine- 

 teenth century. 



The return of the astronomers and the geologists to ancient 

 ideas of gradual development or, as this is now called, evolution, 

 for the lifeless earth, was foreshadowed for the living world with 

 Bonnet (1720-1793) who in 1764, in his Contemplation de la nature, 

 advanced the theory that living things form a gradual and natural 

 "scale" (ladder), rising from lowest to highest without any break 

 in continuity. Buffon, in his great work on natural history, which 

 was published between 1749-1804 in 44 quarto volumes, had 

 dealt with the animal world very much as Linnaeus had dealt 

 with plants, Buffon excelling in description, Linnaeus both in 

 description and in classification and holding firmly to the idea of 

 the fixity as well as the definite demarcation of species. 



Meantime, epoch-making work in zoology was being done by 

 three investigators Lamarck, Cuvier, and St. Hilaire at the 

 Museum of Natural History in Paris. In 1778 Lamarck (1744- 

 1829) published a small book on botany. In 1801 appeared 

 his great work On the Organization of Living Bodies, which is 

 now a landmark in the history of biology and of the doctrine of 

 organic evolution. In this work and in his Philosopkie zoologique, 

 Lamarck boldly proposes to substitute for special creation 



