12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the world acknowledged in Mm its chief contemporary ornament, 

 and to this hour his fame rightly continues. But there was in 

 him, as in Linneeus, a survival of certain theological ways of 

 looking at the universe and certain theological conceptions of a 

 plan of creation ; it must be said, too, that while his temperament 

 made him shy of new hypotheses, of which he had seen the birth 

 and death of so many, his environment as a great functionary of 

 state, honored, admired, almost adored by the greatest, not only 

 in the state but in the Church, his solicitude lest science should 

 receive some detriment by openly resisting the Church, which had 

 recaptured Europe after the French Revolution and had made of 

 its enemies its footstool all these considerations led him to op- 

 pose the new theory. Amid the plaudits, then, of the foremost 

 churchmen and laymen he threw across the path of the evolution 

 doctrines the whole mass of his authority in favor of the old 

 theory of catastrophic changes and special creations. 



Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire stoutly withstood him, braving non- 

 recognition, ill-treatment, and ridicule. Treviranus, afar off in 

 his mathematical lecture room at Bremen, seemed simply for- 

 gotten. 



But the current of evolutionary thought could not thus be 

 checked ; dammed up for a time, it broke out in new channels and 

 in ways and places least expected ; turned away from France, it 

 appeared especially in England ; great paleontologists and geolo- 

 gists arose there whose work culminated in that of Lyell. Spe- 

 cialists throughout all the world now became more vigorous than 

 ever, gathering facts and thinking upon them in a way which 

 caused the special creation theory to shrink more and more. 

 Broader and more full became these various rivulets, soon to unite 

 in one great stream of thought. 



In 1813 Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural 

 selection to account for varieties in the human race ; about 1820 

 Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horticulture, avowed 

 his conviction that species are but fixed varieties ; in 1831 Patrick 

 Matthews stumbled upon and stated the main doctrine of natural 

 selection in evolution ; and others, here and there, in Europe and 

 America, caught an inkling of it. 



But no one outside of a circle apparently uninfluential cared 

 for these things : the Church was serene ; on the continent it had 

 obtained reactionary control of courts, cabinets, and universities ; 

 in England Dean Cockburn was denouncing Mary Somerville 

 and the geologists to the delight of the established churchmen ; 

 and the Rev. Mellor Brown was doing the same thing for the 

 edification of dissenters. 



In America the mild suggestions of Silliman and his compeers 

 were met by the protestations of the Andover theologians headed 



