584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the air long before Darwin. When Emerson speaks of the worm 

 mounting through the various spheres of form, we are sometimes 

 told that in this and other similar remarks he anticipated Darwin. 

 But such language is misleading. Great writers might have gone 

 on until the present moment expressing a conviction that higher 

 forms of life have been evolved from lower forms, but all that 

 would have been of small avail as scientific doctrine until some- 

 body could show how it has been done. The belief in an evolution 

 of higher from lower organisms was held by a few eminent men 

 of science for a great part of the century preceding Mr. Darwin's 

 discovery. It is a belief that could not fail to be strongly sug- 

 gested to minds of a certain philosophic cast as soon as the classi- 

 fication of plants and animals had begun to be conducted upon sci- 

 entific principles. It is not for nothing that a table of classes, 

 orders, families, genera, and species, when graphically laid out, re- 

 sembles a family tree. It was not long after Linnaeus that be- 

 lievers in some sort of a development theory, often fantastic 

 enough, began to appear. Palaeontology gave further suggestions 

 in the same direction. When Cuvier brought palaeontology into 

 alliance with systematic zoology, and effected his grand classifica- 

 tion of animals in space and time, he prepared the way most 

 thoroughly for a theory of evolution, though he always resisted 

 any such inference from his work. He builded better than he 

 knew. A general belief in development, as opposed to special 

 creations, was held by Mr. Darwin's distinguished grandfather in 

 England, by Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France, and 

 by Oken and Goethe in Germany. In the present age it was 

 maintained in print by Herbert Spencer in 1852, before Darwin 

 had published anything on the subject. 



During the early part of the present century applications of the 

 comparative method in various directions were rapidly educating 

 the minds of the younger generation of students into a vague per- 

 ception of development as something characteristic of all sorts of 

 phenomena. The first two great triumphs of the comparative 

 method were achieved contemporaneously in two fields of inquiry 

 very remote from one another: the one was the work of Cuvier 

 just mentioned, the other was the founding of the comparative 

 philology of the Aryan languages by Franz Bopp in 1816. The 

 work of Bopp exerted as powerful an influence throughout all the 

 historical fields of study as Cuvier exerted in biology. The young 

 men whose minds were receiving their formative impulses be- 

 tween 1825 and 1840, under the various influences of Cuvier and 

 Saint-Hilaire, Lyell, Goethe, Bopp, and other such great leaders, 

 began themselves to come to the foreground as leaders of thought 

 about 1800, on the one hand, such men as Darwin, Gray, Huxley, 

 and Wallace ; on the other hand, such as Kuhn and Schleicher, 



