EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS. 239 



even those who do not forget that the theory of the transmutation of 

 species has been a familiar and influential doctrine, established upon 

 fairly conclusive arguments ever since the beginning of the nineteenth 

 century, are likely to forget the fact that the doctrine, in its proper 

 modern form, takes its origin, as a respectably fathered and militant 

 hypothesis, in France in the middle of the eighteenth century. The 

 histories of the theory of evolution* mention, indeed, a number of 

 names in the eighteenth and in many earlier centuries, with which 

 vague and more or less eccentric foreshadowings of the now accepted 

 doctrine are connected. But the books on the subject which we have 

 in English are unfortunately either inadequate or inaccurate or both; 

 and they rather disguise than reveal the real character and significance 

 of the evolutionist movement in the eighteenth century. Many of 

 them — Mr. Clodd's book, for example, and Huxley's essay, and Pro- 

 fessor Packard 's ' Lamarck, ' as well as the French works of Perrier and 

 of Quatrefages on the precursors of Darwin — ignore some of the most 

 important and most influential eighteenth century evolutionists; Pro- 

 fessor Osborn's survey ('From the Greeks to Darwin,' 1894) is more 

 comprehensive but regrettably inaccurate. There is therefore some 

 occasion for a fresh attempt to clear up some points in the earlier his- 

 tory of the central conception of modern biology. 



It is unfortunate that the eighteenth century manifestations of 

 evolutionism should have so generally been grouped, by those who have 

 written of them, in one class with the ancient adumbrations of Dar- 

 winism, as if all alike were merely interesting historic accidents. The 

 ancient foreshadowings of the doctrine were, indeed, little more than 

 happy but fortuitous guesses of ingenious minds. But the mid- 

 eighteenth century outcropping of the theory was a natural, one may 

 almost say an inevitable, consequence of the progress which had up to 

 that time been made in natural science. And the theory found ex- 

 pression, not in the sporadic utterances of an obscure philosopher here 

 and there, but in the best-known writings of three of the most cele- 

 brated leaders of the opinion of their time; so that, however little it 

 may have gained acceptance, the theory must have been pretty widely 

 known among their contemporaries. It is, of course, a fact sufficiently 

 familiar that Buffon in 1749 propounded the conception of the trans- 

 formation of species as a possible hypothesis; that he pointed out the 

 homological evidence in favor of such an hypothesis, and tended in 

 some passages to accept it; but that, in his most important passage on 



* In this paper the word ' evolution ' is used in its common contemporary 

 sense, as meaning the descent of species from earlier species. The reader will, 

 however, remember that in the eighteenth century the same term was employed 

 to designate the process of the generation of individual organisms as conceived 

 by the preformationist, — i. e., the process of the literal ' development ' or un- 

 folding of the ready-made and preexisting parts of the embryo. Most ' evolu- 

 tionists ' in this eighteenth century sense were not evolutionists in the more 

 modern sense in which the word is here used. 



