KANT AND EVOLUTION 545 



also the favorable views already taken of that precedent by writers of 

 recognized respectability. 



Moreover, as the passage just cited indicates, Descartes was not the 

 onl} r , though he was the most eminent, predecessor of Kant to set an 

 example of an undertaking similar to that upon which Kant was enter- 

 ing. Hypotheses about the origin of the world or of our planet may 

 be said to have been especially in fashion during the late seventeenth 

 and early eighteenth century. In the words of Cuvier, 11 



The end of the seventeenth century saw the birth of a new science, which 

 took in its infancy the high-sounding name of " Theory of the Earth." Starting 

 from a small number of facts badly observed, connecting them by fantastic sup- 

 positions, it professed to go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play 

 with them, and to create their history. 



The " Theoria Telluris Sacra," 1681, 1689, and the " Archseologise 

 Philosophies," 1692, of Thomas Burnet, and the " New Theory of the 

 Earth," 1696, of William Whiston — successor to Newton's professor- 

 ship at Cambridge, effective popularizer of the Newtonian doctrines, 

 and the supposed original of Goldsmith's " Dr. Primrose " — were based 

 upon an incongruous mixture of scientific and scriptural considerations ; 

 but they at least made cosmogony a topic of general interest. As much, 

 if little more, can be said of Woodward's " Essay toward a Natural 

 History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies," 1695. But in 1734 there 

 was published at Leipsic a treatise which resembled Laplace's theory 

 much more nearly than did Kant's. The " Principia rerum natu- 

 ralium " of Swedenborg — already celebrated as a geologist and metal- 

 lurgist, not yet celebrated as a mystic and religious reformer — enunci- 

 ated the following theses : 12 



That the sun is the center of a vortex; that it rotates upon its axis; that 

 the solar matter concentrated itself into a belt or zone or ring at the equator, 

 or rather at the ecliptic; that by the attenuation of the ring it became dis- 

 rupted ; that upon the disruption, parts of the matter collected into globes ; . . . 

 that the globes of solar matter were projected into space; . . . that in propor- 

 tion as the igneous matter thus projected receded from the sun it gradually 

 experienced refrigeration and consequent condensation; that hence followed the 

 formation of the elements of ether, air, aqueous vapor, etc., until the planets 

 finally reached their present orbit; that during this period the earth experienced 

 a succession of geological changes which originated all the varieties in the 

 mineral kingdom, and laid, as it were, the basis of the vegetable and afterwards 

 of the animal kingdoms. 



The idea of planetary evolution was thus anything but a novelty in 

 1755. What is more, the decade immediately preceding the completion 

 of Kant's " Allgemeine Naturgeschichte " may be said to have been 

 especially distinguished by the prominence with which, during it, ques- 

 tions of cosmogony were brought to the attention of the learned world. 



u " Eloge de Werner," cited in Packard's " Lamarck," p. 92. 

 "I borrow the summary of Clissold, from his introduction to the English 

 translation of Swedenborg's " Principia," 1846. 



