84 SCIENCE IN THE LAST HALF CENTUKY. 



the age with their ecclesiastical opponents. Catastrophism, a short- 

 sighted teleology, and a still more short-sighted orthodoxy, joined 

 forces to crush evolution. 



Lyell and Poulett Scrope, in this country, resumed the work of the 

 Italians and of Hutton ; and the former, aided by a marvellous power 

 of clear exposition, placed upon an irrelragable basis the truth that 

 natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be 

 proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which 

 have talien place during the deposition of the stratified rocks. The 

 publication of " The Principles of Geology," in 1830, constituted an 

 epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch in the 

 modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind of 

 every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is compe- 

 tent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should it not 

 account tor the living part? 



By keeping this question before- the public for some thirty years, 

 Lyell, though the keenest and most formidable of the opponents of the 

 transmutation theory, as it w^as formulated by Lamarck, was of the 

 greatest possible service in facilitating the reception of the sounder 

 doctrines of a later day. And in like fashion, another vehement op- 

 ponent of the transmutation of species, the elder Agassiz, was doomed 

 to help the cause he hated. Agassiz not only maintained the fact of 

 the progressive advance in organization of the inhabitants of the earth 

 at each successive geological epoch, but he insisted upon the analogy 

 of the steps of this progression with those by which the embryo ad- 

 vances to the adult condition, among the highest forms of each groni). 

 In fact, in endeavoriug to support these views he went a good way be- 

 yond the limits of any cautious interi)retation of the facts then known. 



Although little acquainted with biological science, Whewell seems 

 to have taken particular pains with that part of his work which deals 

 with the history of geological and biological speculation ; and several 

 chapters of his seventeenth and eighteenth books, which comprise the 

 history of physiology, of comparative anatomi" and of the pahptiological 

 sciences, vividly reproduce the controversies of the enrly days of the 

 Victorian epoch. But here, as in the case of the doctrine of the con- 

 servation of energy, the historian of the inductive sciences has no ])ro- 

 phetic insight; not even a suspicion of that which the near future was 

 to bring forth. And those who still repeat the once favorite objection 

 that Darwin's " Origin of Species" is nothing but a new version of the 

 " Philosophic zoologique" will find that, so late as 1844, Whewell had 

 not the slightest suspicion of Darwin's nmin theorem, even as a logical 

 possibilit5\ In fact, the publication of that theorem by Darwin and 

 Wallace, in 1859, took all the biological world by surprise. Neither 

 those who were inclined towards the "progressive transmutation " or 

 "development" doctrine, as it was then called, nor those who were 

 opposed to it, had the slightest suspicion that the tendency to variation 



