AGASSIZ AND DARWINISM. 699 



some time read, or looked over, the " Origin of Species ;" but there is 

 not a word in these lectures which might not have been written by- 

 one who had never heard of that book, or of the arguments which 

 made the publication of it the beginning of a new epoch in the history 

 of science. 



Not only is it that Prof. Agassiz does not attack the Darwinian 

 theory in these lectures ; it is also that, until the ninth lecture, he does 

 not allude to the doctrine of Evolution in any way. His first eight 

 lectures consist mostly in an account of the development of the embryo 

 in various animals ; and in this we have a pure description of facts 

 with which no one certainly will feel like quarrelling, so far as theories 

 are concerned. He goes to work, very much as Max Mtiller does, in 

 lecturing about the science of language, when he gives you a maximum 

 of interesting etymologies and a minimum of real philosophizing which 

 goes to the bottom of things. But Prof. Agassiz is not so interesting 

 or so stimulating in his discourse as Max Mtiller. He does not lead us 

 into pleasant fields of illustration, where we would fain tarry longer, 

 forgetting the main purpose of the discussion in our delight at the un- 

 essential matters which occupy our attention. On the contrary, it 

 seems to me that Prof. Agassiz's explanation of the development of 

 eggs is rather tedious and dry, and by no means richly fraught with 

 novel suggestions. The exposition is a commonplace one, such as is 

 good for students in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, who are 

 beginning to study embryology, but there are no features which make 

 it especially interesting or instructive to any one who has already 

 served an apprenticeship in these matters. 



In his ninth lecture, Prof. Agassiz begins to make some allusion 

 to the development theory not to the development theory as it now 

 stands since the publication of the " Origin of Species," but to the de- 

 velopment theory as it stood in the days when Prof. Agassiz was a 

 young student, when Cuvier and the elder Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire 

 waged fierce warfare in the French Academy, and when the aged 

 Goethe, sanest and wisest of men, foresaw in the issue of that battle 

 the speedy triumph of the development theory. Beyond this point, I 

 will venture to say, Prof. Agassiz has never travelled. The doctrine 

 of Evolution is still, to him, what it was in those early days ; and all 

 the discoveries and reasonings of Mr. Darwin have passed by him un- 

 heeded and unnoticed. He arrived too early at that rigidity of mind 

 which prevents us from properly comprehending new theories, and 

 which we should all of us dread. 



What, now, is the doctrine which Prof. Agassiz begins to attack, 

 in his ninth lecture, and what is the doctrine which he would propose 

 as a substitute ? The doctrine which he attacks is simply this that 

 all organic beings have come into existence through some natural pro- 

 cess of causation ; and the doctrine which he defends is just this that 

 all organic beings, as classed in species, have come into existence at 



