The Doctrine of Evolution. 443 



the century preceding Mr. Darwin's discovery. It is a be- 

 lief that could not fail to be strongly suggested to minds of 

 a certain philosophic cast as soon as the classification of plants 

 and animals had begun to be conducted upon scientific prin- 

 ciples. It is not for nothing that a table of classes, orders, 

 families, genera, and species, when graphically laid out, re- 

 sembles a family tree. It was not long after Linnaeus that 

 believers in some sort of a development theory, often fan- 

 tastic enough, began to appear. Palaeontology gave further 

 suggestions in the same direction. When Cuvier brought 

 palaeontology into alliance with systematic zoology, and ef- 

 fected his grand classification of animals in space and time, 

 he prepared the way most thoroughly for a theory of evolu- 

 tion, though he always resisted any such inference from his 

 work. He builded better than he knew. A general belief 

 in development, as opposed to special creations, was held 

 by Mr. Darwin's distinguished grandfather in England, by 

 Lamarck and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire in France, and by Oken 

 and Goethe in Germany. In the present age it was main- 

 tained in print by Herbert Spencer in 1852, before Darwin 

 had published anything on the subject. 



During the early part of the present century applications 

 of the comparative method in various directions were rapidly 

 educating the minds of the younger generation of students 

 into a vague perception of development as something char- 

 acteristic of all sorts of phenomena. The first two great 

 triumphs of the comparative method were achieved contem- 

 poraneously in two fields of inquiry very remote from one 

 another : the one was the work of Cuvier just mentioned, 

 the other was the founding of the comparative philology of 

 the Aryan languages by Franz Bopp in 1816. The work of 

 Bopp exerted as powerful an influence throughout all the his- 

 torical fields of study as Cuvier exerted in biology. The young 

 men whose minds were receiving their formative impulses 

 between 1825 and 1840, under the various influences of 

 Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Lyell, Goethe, Bopp, and other 

 such great leaders, began themselves to come to the fore- 

 ground as leaders of thought about 1860 on the one hand, 

 such men as Darwin, Gray, Huxley, and Wallace ; on the 

 other hand, such as Kuhn and Schleicher, Maine, Maurer, 

 Mommsen, Freeman, and Tylor. The point of the compara- 

 tive method, in whatever field it may be applied, is that it 

 brings before us a great number of objects so nearly alike 

 that we are bound to assume for them an origin and general 



