FROM THALES TO LAMARCK 9 



'It is indeed a terrible thing,' replied Soret ; 'but what 

 else could you expect, with such conditions and such a Cabinet, 

 than the expulsion of the Koyal Family ? ' 



' You seem to misunderstand me,' said Goethe, ' I am 

 not thinking of those people ; I am speaking of the rupture 

 which has taken place before the French Academy between 

 Cuvier and St.-Hilaire ! This matter is of the utmost importance 

 to science and you can have no idea of my feelings at these 

 news. We have now in St.-Hilaire a powerful ally.' 



It was only some time after Cuvier's death, when K. E. A. 

 Hoff and the great English geologist Charles Lyell had proved 

 irrefutably that the evolution of the earth had taken place in 

 obedience to the same laws that still govern it and that the 

 various periods of the earth's history were connected by gradual 

 stages, that the theory of catastrophism fell, and with it the 

 hypothesis of the invariability of the species. 



That even such a clear thinker as Cuvier came to assume the 

 coming, at certain periods, of enormous catastrophes which 

 annihilated all life was probably not so much due to the in- 

 fluence of traditions Indian, Arabic, Biblical but rather to the 

 fact that at that time it was general greatly to underestimate 

 the periods which had elapsed since the earth had become a unit 

 in the universe. To compress within a few thousand years the 

 evolution of what Nature had used millions of years to achieve 

 meant of necessity the assumption of all-destroying catastrophes. 

 Indeed, the history of the world would be nothing but a blood- 

 stained record of murder and destruction if we were to assume 

 that it had covered but a few decades. 



The first man who clearly enunciated the idea of evolution 

 is the poet and naturalist Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the grand- 

 father of Charles Darwin. The works of this man, in par- 

 ticular his 'Zoonornia, or The Laws of Organic Life' (1794), 

 contain by the side of numerous profound observations, often 

 almost of a prophetic character, many childlike conceptions even 

 of the simplest processes of life. On one side we find the free 

 outlook of the far-seeing naturalist ; on the other, the short- 

 sightedness of teleological dogma. But that fact cannot lessen 

 his merits, for Erasmus Darwin was the first who taught the 

 variability of the species and the adaptation of an organ to its 



