208 Zoology as Related to Evolution. 



serving God and yet not offending Mammon, even a minister 

 in the pulpit could hardly rival. 



The new species of zoology thus feebly begun developed 

 in the time of Cuvier into a great school of brilliant think- 

 ers who in their aims and methods were widely differenti- 

 ated from the old stock. On the side of the past were the 

 patient observers and careful experimentalists who held to 

 the traditional doctrine of species as the immediate work of 

 the Creator, and believed in letting new theories about 

 causes alone and in confining themselves to the collection 

 and arrangement of facts. On the other side were the bold 

 speculators and nature-philosophers who believed in study- 

 ing the causes which underlie the facts, and in all species 

 as originating through natural laws out of a primitive 

 stock, a side which embraced such advocates as Erasmus 

 Darwin (1731-1802), who believed in a slow inward vari- 

 ability as leading to their differences ; Lamarck (1744-1829), 

 who ascribed them to the efforts accumulating through in- 

 heritance of the animals themselves; St.-Hilaire (1772- 

 1844), who emphasized the action of the environment ; 

 Oken (1779-1851), who taught the doctrine of protoplasm 

 and the cell ; and Goethe (1749-1832), who explained the 

 skull with all its wonders as only an enlargement of the 

 upper spinal vertebra. The antagonism between the two 

 schools widened gradually from word and work into feeling 

 and friction ; and at last, in 1830, it broke out on the floor 

 of the French Academy in an open dispute, headed by 

 Cuvier on the one side and St.-Hilaire on the other, which 

 for violence and ferocity the beasts themselves could hardly 

 have excelled, the famous dispute which Goethe at his home 

 in Weimar looked upon as of so much more importance 

 than the French Eevolution breaking out at the same 

 time, that he could hardlv imagine how his friend, when he 

 spoke to him of " this great event," could think he referred 

 to the mere political outbreak. 



Cuvier won the victory for the time in hand, nothing 

 being able to withstand the torrent of facts that his brain, 

 made on the mitrailleuse principle, was able to pour forth ; 

 and for thirty years he was the hero, the world over, of 

 conservatism and the church. All the same, however, the 

 new phase of the science kept on with its growth. Von 

 Baer (1792-1876) opened and read the testimony of em- 

 bryology ; John Miller dissected and described, with an 

 accuracy unknown before, the animal body; Eichard Owen 



