122 THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE ANIMAL WORLD 



not very tenable from a philosophical point of 

 view, of successive creations has been maintained 

 with real talent by the disciples of the Cuverian 

 school, by d'Orbigny, Agassiz, d'Archiac, and 

 Barrande, all exaggerating, and even going beyond 

 the idea of the master. On a track directly op- 

 posed to this, Lamarck and Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire 

 constructed on purely biological bases the doctrine 

 of descent, the transformations of beings resulting, 

 according to Lamarck, from an adaptation to physio- 

 logical needs, and according to Geoffrey, from the 

 direct influence of the surrounding media ; while the 

 last-named at the same time sowed in the science the 

 germ of the hypothesis of sudden variation and the 

 theory of the parallelism between individual embryonic 

 development and palceontological evolution. After 

 a partial eclipse, we have seen the transformist 

 hypothesis receive a new and definitive impulse 

 from the ingenious researches of the illustrious 

 Darwin on the processes of transformation of living 

 beings by artificial selection and natural selection, 

 the latter having for cause the eternal struggle for 

 life and for reproduction. Darwinism, though 

 greatly inferior to Lamarckism as regards the im- 

 portance and the real efficacy of the causes of 

 evolution, definitely triumphed over all the re- 

 sistance of the last partisans of the fixity of species, 

 thanks to the co-operation of passionate champions 

 of the transformist hypothesis K. Wallace, T. H. 

 Huxley, and Edward Haeckel. This last, by a 

 method purely embryological, endeavoured to demon- 

 strate the monopliyletic evolution of the two king- 

 doms, and from the parallelism of Ontogeny and of 





