330 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



entirely controlled the development of biology at that time, and who will 

 be discussed in the next chapters — namely, Cuvier and Bichat — both em- 

 braced an entirely different theory from Lamarck's as to the intrinsic nature 

 of life, nor, indeed, did the latter's speculation really possess that force and 

 consistency which would have enabled it to hold its own against more mod- 

 ern directions of thought. Neither, on the other hand, did contemporary 

 natural philosophers pay any attention to this thought-system, which, even 

 from its own point of view, became rapidly out of date and, besides, was 

 not particularly complete in form; to one such as Schelling and his school 

 it must indeed have been an abomination, if only on account of its connexion 

 with the hated seventeenth-century materialism, and even Goethe had much 

 the same motive for leaving it at its worth. The day arrived, however, when 

 the mechanical conception of life again came into its own and when La- 

 marck's Philosophic :^oologique underwent a brilliant revival. The account of 

 this revival is reserved for a future chapter; but this much may be pointed 

 out here, that Lamarck's greatest admirer in modern times, Haeckel,not only 

 adopted his theory of evolution, but also a considerable amount of both 

 good and bad out of his materialistic psychology — this, too, having thus 

 exercised some influence up to our own day. 



But though Lamarck's ideas were thus to have a future, the biological 

 research of his own age was being directed by a man with an entirely differ- 

 ent conception of nature and its phenomena, a man who possessed to a rare 

 degree a conception of those problems which at that time most urgently 

 required solution, and who was, moreover, capable of dealing with these 

 problems in a manner that redounded to the lasting benefit of science. This 

 scientist was Cuvier, one of the foremost of those who laid the foundations 

 of biology in the modern sense of the word. 



