CHARLES DARWIN AND DARWINISM 37 



relations of biology and of the manners of plants 

 and animals, and powerfully assisted by an almost 

 universal erudition, the illustrious English natura- 

 list was able to use in defence of the transformist 

 theory a force of demonstration which was lacking 

 to his predecessors, and could not fail to obtain in 

 a short space of time the adhesion of the majority 

 of biologists. 



But it is important to notice that Darwin was 

 very little of a palaeontologist. The only fossil 

 animals he had personally studied, and that with 

 a very real talent the Cirripedes Anatifa, Balana, 

 and Coronula form a group degraded in their adult 

 state by fixation or parasitism, and but little fitted 

 on that account to make any interesting contribu- 

 tion to the history of evolution. Darwin also ap- 

 proached only with extreme diffidence the palseonto- 

 logical, but most important side of the transformist 

 hypothesis ; yet his vast erudition enabled him to 

 appreciate at its just value the weight of the ob- 

 jections raised against this theory by men of such 

 authority as E. Forbes, Woodward, Murchison, 

 Sedgwick, Pictet, Agassiz, Barrande, d'Archiac, and 

 many other determined partizans of the fixity of 

 species, and of the integral renewal of the fossil 

 faunas. Compelled to answer these objections of 

 fact, Darwin could only combat them by theoretical 

 arguments, often of mediocre value, but always 

 ingenious. 



If we so rarely observe, he replies, in the layers 

 of the earth's crust, the innumerable intermediate 

 forms required by the transformist theory, it is 

 because these forms have only been able to be 



