I30 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



the volcanic fluid of tlie interior of earth. Lyell thus demon- 

 strated a continuous and uninterrupted connection of the 

 whole history of the earth, and he proved it so irrefutably, 

 and established so convincingly the supremacy of the " ex- 

 isting causes," that is, of the causes which are still active 

 in the transformation of the earth's crust, that Geology in 

 a short time completely renounced Cuvier's hypothesis. 



Now, it is remarkable that Palaeontology, the science of 

 petrifactions, so far as it was pursued by botanists and zoolo- 

 gists, remained apparently unaffected by this great progress 

 in geology. Biology still continued to assume repeated new 

 creations of the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms, at 

 the beginning of every new period of the earth's history, 

 although this hypothesis of individual creations, shoved into 

 the world one after the other, without the assumption of 

 Cuvier's cataclysms, became pure nonsense, and lost its 

 foundation. It is evidently perfectly absurd to assume a 

 distinct new creation of the whole world of animals and 

 plants at definite epochs, without the crust of the earth 

 itself experiencing any considerable general revolution. 

 And although this conception is most closely connected 

 with Cuvier's theory of catastrophes, still it prevailed when 

 the latter had been completely destroyed and abandoned. 



It was reserved for the great English naturalist, Charles 

 Darwin, to remove this contradiction, and to show that the 

 organic beings of the earth have a history as continuous and 

 connected as the inorganic crust of the earth ; that animals 

 and plants have arisen from one another by as gradual a 

 transmutation as that by which the varying forms of the 

 earth's crust, the forms of the continents, and of the seas 

 surrounding and separating them, have arisen out of earlier 



