CHARLES DARWIN. 79 



which was almost universally held up to the close of the i8th 

 century, was that every species of animal and plant originally 

 existed in, and owed its present form to, a special act of creation. 

 No variation of importance had occurred between the types ; the 

 plants and animals individually kept their original form quite un- 

 changed down through the ages. 



This crude belief was supported in popular thought by some 

 verses in the ist chapter of Genesis, and no one ever paused to 

 think whether the words in Genesis really presupposed any such 

 notion. They did not stay to enquire whether the author, whoever 

 he was, was a scientific man, or whether he wrote for a scientific age 

 or not, but accepted the doctrine preached without gainsaying. 

 This is the less to be wondered at, because the wonderful variety 

 of living beings and their variability, known in our time well 

 enough, were then unknown, especially to ordinary observers. I 

 need not stay, here and now, to point out the foolishness of 

 adhering to such a belief in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to 

 the contrary, or the unwisdom of any man who, " before distin- 

 guished audiences at the Mansion House " and elsewhere, tries to 

 prove the exactest accord, even in minutest detail, between ' Moses 

 and Geology.' Suffice it that I have said that this doctrine of 

 * Fixity and Immutability ' prevailed up to 1800 or thereabouts. 



Linn?eus gave the weight of his authority to this belief, and, so 

 far as we know, never accepted any other. Buffon, first among the 

 great naturalists, was the one to timidly suggest the doctrine of 

 modification. He pointed out that under external differences there 

 were fundamental likenesses suggestive of common origin, and 

 yet so strong was the power of the then accepted teaching that he 

 used to say, "No, it cannot be after all;" indeed, we are told 

 that once, at least, he had " to submit and demand pardon from 

 the offended orthodoxy (?) of the Paris faculty." His suggestion, 

 however, did bear fruit. " The startling plop of Buffon's little 

 smooth-cut pebble," as Grant Allen calls it, caused a wave of 

 thought and investigation, whose circles spread wider and wider, 

 and we may question if even yet the outermost circle has found its 

 shore. Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Goethe, and Erasmus Darwin each 

 independently saw the probable truth of Buffon's theory. It was 

 reserved for Lamarck, in 1 801, to fully take up the subject and 



