ST. HILAIRE. 197 



that of Cuvier, and in support of this school his 

 name came into wide celebrity by the famous dis- 

 cussion of 1830 in the French Academy of Sciences, 

 to which Goethe alluded. He added largely to 

 the evidences of * filiation ' and contributed sev- 

 eral entirely original theoretical ' factors ' of trans- 

 formation ; nevertheless, there is an undercurrent 

 of doubt as to the extent of the law of Evolution, 

 in all his writings. He was not a radical evolution- 

 ist like Lamarck. 



Perrier, Quatrefages, and the younger St. Hilaire 

 have carefully studied his opinions and history. 

 St. Hilaire was a pupil of Buffon, but as a thinker 

 he mainly acknowledges his debt to the German 

 Natural Philosophers and especially to Schelling 

 in his researches upon the philosophy of Nature ; 

 although he does not follow Schelling in his advo- 

 cacy of the superiority of the deductive method. 



St. Hilaire's method was professedly inductive. 

 Ideas, he said, should be directly engendered by 

 facts. His conceptions were often a priori, but his 

 demonstrations were always a posteriori. In his 

 speculation upon Evolution, we see that St. Hilaire 

 was by no means always consistent with his method, , 

 but was very largely influenced by certain classes 

 of facts which came under his direct observation,- 

 and reasoned from these to laws touching facts of 

 quite a distinct character. Goethe says of him: 

 " He recalls Buffon in some points of view. He 

 does not stop at Nature existing or achieved ; he 



