THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



stitution at Alexandria and was not revived until the 

 seventeenth century. 



With the Renaissance, the taste for antiquity arose, 

 and men of wealth began to collect memorials of the 

 past; but it was not until 1683 that a museum for 

 scientific purposes was established, which has been 

 maintained to the present time. In that year the Ash- 

 molean Museum, founded by Elias Ashmole, was 

 housed in a suitable building at Oxford. This was a 

 half century after Francis Bacon had outlined for the 

 first time in his New Atlantis the plan for a great mu- 

 seum of art and science. In this century also arose the 

 great learned societies of Germany, England, and 

 France, which did such great work in promoting 

 science. The British Museum was founded in 1759 

 from the nucleus of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane. 

 At about the same time the Museum d'Histoire Natu- 

 relle in Paris and the important museums in Germany 

 began their comprehensive collections. 



It is very significant that this movement to estab- 

 lish collections of fauna and flora was contempora- 

 neous with the life of Linnaeus (1707-1778). Al- 

 though Linnaeus was a steadfast believer in the fixity 

 of species as created and continued by God and con- 

 stantly endeavoured to strengthen this opinion by his 

 classification of fauna and flora, yet his work, in the 

 end, had just the opposite effect. His enormous labour 

 of classification and his system of nomenclature, in 

 which he first named the order and, by a second name, 



C 134 ] 



