410 FOUNDATIONS OF BIOLOGY 



Through the relative weakness of Lamarck's successors 

 the French school of evolutionists dwindled to practical 

 extinction; while in Germany, GOETHE (1749-1832), the 

 greatest poet of evolution, and TREVIRANUS (1776-1837) 

 "brilliantly carried the argument without carrying convic- 

 tion," for the man and the moment must agree. Then in 

 England the uniformitarian ideas of HUTTON (1726-1797), 

 elaborated by LYELL (1797-1875) in his Principles of Geology 

 (1830-1833), established evolution in geology, and the way 

 was paved for CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882) to do the same 

 for the organic world. It is true that "the idea of develop- 

 ment saturated the intellectual atmosphere nevertheless 

 the elaborate and toilsome labor of thinking it through for 

 the endless realm of nature was to be done" and Darwin 

 did it in his Origin of Species which appeared in 1859. By 

 his brilliant, scholarly, open-minded, and cautious mar- 

 shalling of the facts pointing toward the universality of varia- 

 tions and the mutability of species; and by the theory of 

 natural selection on the basis of slight adaptive variations 

 resulting in the survival of the fittest in the struggle for 

 existence which, strange to say, Darwin and WALLACE 

 (1822-1913) reached simultaneously and independently - 

 Darwin "made the old idea current intellectual coin." 



To-day, as we know, no representative biologist questions 

 the fact of evolution "evolution knows only one heresy, the 

 denial of continuity" -though in regard to the factors 

 involved there is much difference of opinion. It may well 

 be that we shall have reason to depart widely from Darwin's 

 interpretation of the effective principles at work in the origin 

 of species, but withal this will have little influence on his 

 position in the history of biology. The great value which he 

 placed upon facts was exceeded only by his demonstration 

 that this "value is due to their power of guiding the mind to a 



