240 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the subject, he rejected it, partly on grounds of religious orthodoxy. 

 Professor Packard, in his life of Lamarck, has recently presented an 

 interesting study of Buff on 's exact position in the matter. These 

 equivocal expressions of Buff on 's are, however, commonly spoken of 

 as if they were unique in their period; whereas the same hypothesis 

 was put forward, within a decade, by two countrymen of his who were 

 hardly less representative than he of the scientific progress of their 

 generation. For one of them was the president of the Eoyal Academy 

 of Science of Berlin ; and the other was the editor of the Encyclopaedia. 



There were two distinct lines of development in scientific investiga- 

 tion and theory during the first half of the eighteenth century which 

 led up to and suggested the theory of transformation as a natural and 

 probable hypothesis in zoology. The first of these was the active 

 prosecution of both observation and speculation in the field of embry- 

 ology; the second was the development of the new science of com- 

 parative anatomy at the hands of Daubenton. The representative of 

 the former way of approach to evolutionism is Maupertuis. In speak- 

 ing of him, I venture to improve the occasion to give some general 

 account of his place in the history of science, since the matter is one 

 about which little trustworthy information appears to be generally 

 accessible. Such an account will make the significance and the grounds 

 of his evolutionary opinions more apparent. 



I. Maupertuis. — Although not without some reputation as the 

 reorganizer of the Berlin Academy* — for which task he was especially 

 imported from France by Frederick the Great — and as the director 

 of the first expedition to demonstrate the flattening of the globe at the 

 poles by the measurement of a degree of longitude at different latitudes, 

 Maupertuis is usually made to play a somewhat comic role in the 

 literary history of his century, as the rival of Voltaire for the favor of 

 Frederick and as the victim of one of Voltaire's most ferocious satires. 

 Although Frederick took the side of Maupertuis in that famous quarrel 

 and caused the copies of Voltaire's libel to be burned by the hangman 

 in all the public places of Berlin, the satirist has been more successful 

 in gaining the ear of posterity. Immensely famous and respected 

 as a sort of scientific oracle in his own day, Maupertuis seems now 

 to be best known through the misrepresentations of his adversary; 

 there is even reason to fear, from internal evidence, that some learned 

 historians of philosophy, in the little they have to say about the 'Native 

 of St. Malo' — as Voltaire always designated him — have depended more 

 upon the 'Histoire du Docteur Akakia' than upon a careful examina- 

 tion of Maupertuis 's own writings. Yet — in spite of the touch of 

 vanity which sometimes made him ridiculous and the superficiality of 

 a good deal of his knowledge — his reputation deserves in some measure 



* For the earlier history of the Berlin Academy, see The Popular Science 

 Monthly, March, 1904. 



