432 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
known to them. As one of these pioneers we must not omit to men- 
tion our own poet, Goethe, though he rather threw out premonitory 
hints of a theory of evolution than actually taught it. “ Alle Ges- 
talten sind aihnlich, doch keine gleichet der andere, und so deutet der 
Chor auf ein geheimes Gesetz.” 
The “secret law” was the law of descent, and the first to define 
this idea and to formulate it clearly as a theory was, as is well 
known, also a Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, who 
set it forth in his book, “ Zoonomia,” in 1796. A few years later 
Treviranus, a botanist of Bremen, published a book of similar 
purport, and he was followed in 1809 by the Frenchman, Lamarck, 
and the German, Lorenz Oken. 
All these disputed the venerable Mosaic mythos of creation, which 
had till then been accepted as a scientific document, and all of 
them sought to show that the constancy of species throvghout the 
ages was only an appearance due, as Lamarck in particular pointed 
out, to the shortness of human life. 
But Cuvier, the greatest zoologist of that time, a pupil of the 
Stuttgart Karlsschule, would have none of this idea, and held fast 
to the conception of species created once for all, seeing in it the 
only possible explanation of the enormous diversity of animal and 
plant forms. 
And there was much to be said for this attitude at that time, 
when the knowledge of facts was not nearly comprehensive enough 
to afford a secure and scientific basis for the theory of descent. 
Lamarck alone had attempted to indicate the forces from which, 
in his opinion, the transmutation of species could have resulted. 
It was not, however, solely because the basis of fact was insufficient 
that the theory of the evolution of organic nature did not gain ground 
at that time; it was even more because such foundation as there 
was for it was not adhered to. All sorts of vague speculations were 
indulged in, and these contributed less and less to the support of 
the theory the more far-reaching they became. Many champions 
of the “ Naturphilosophie ” of the time, especially Oken and Schel- 
ling, promulgated mere hypotheses as truths; forsaking the realm 
of fact almost entirely, they attempted to construct the whole world 
with a free hand, so to speak, and lost themselves more and more 
in worthless phantasy. 
This naturally brought the theory of evolution, and with it 
“ Naturphilosophie,” into disrepute, especially with the true natural- 
ists, those who patiently observe and collect new facts. The theory 
lost all credence, and sank so low in the general estimation that it 
came to be regarded as hardly fitting for a naturalist to occupy 
himself with philosophical conceptions. 
This was the state of matters onward from 1830, the year in which 
the final battle between the theory of evolution and the old theory 
