EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN 25 



The act of creation itself marked off the limits of 

 every species which was, therefore, doomed to remain 

 constant and immutable. Linnaeus' theory of the 

 origin of living things was purely biblical and the 

 only way in which he contributed, quite indirectly, to 

 the introduction of the transmutation doctrine, was 

 by assigning to man, in his classification, a place, not 

 merely among the other animals, but in a genus in- 

 cluding the anthropoid apes, man being merely a 

 species of that genus. 



The theory of the immutability of species increased 

 in popularity in Cuvier's time ; Cuvier considered it a 

 necessary postulate and it became the basis of all the 

 scientific knowledge of that period. 



Cuvier's services to science are well-known. By 

 grouping Linnaeus' species in categories or types 

 characterised by an organic unity of their own, he 

 established the foundations of comparative anatomy; 

 he originated the paleontology of the vertebrates and, 

 after studying the fauna of the successive geological 

 strata, he demonstrated that the lower the stratum 

 lies to which a fauna belongs, the more widely that 

 fauna differs from the fauna of the present day. 

 That great discovery was, however, erroneously in- 

 terpreted by Cuvier, who conducted his research work 

 along the wrong lines. 



He attributed to sudden cataclysms the complete 

 disappearance of each successive fauna. From the 



