30 THE THEORIES OF EVOLUTION 



ceptance until Darwin's time, half a century later, 

 when Europe's scientific mentality was ripe for it. 



Among his French contemporaries, Lamarck found 

 one disciple in Etienne GeofFroi Saint-Hilaire. It 

 was GeofFroi Saint-Hilaire who, in 1830, took his 

 stand against Cuvier in the Academy of Sciences in 

 a sensational debate which lasted almost six months, 

 a duel, so to speak, between the theory of transmu- 

 tation and the theory of the invariability of species. 

 That controversy became famous in all the scientific 

 world; Goethe, then 81 years of age, took a keen in- 

 terest in it and devoted his last work, completed in 

 1832, to a review of the debate, pointing out its great 

 scientific and philosophical import. 



And yet the outcome of that far-famed contest 

 was not favourable to the new ideas. In the opinion 

 of the majority, the victory remained on the side of 

 Cuvier, who crushed his opponent under an accumula- 

 tion of facts to which his authoritative interpretation 

 gave the weight of incontestable arguments. 



In Germany the idea of evolution was advocated 

 by the "nature philosophers." Some of them were 

 famous naturalists, among others Oken who, like 

 Goethe, formulated a vertebral theory of the skull 

 and conceived, even before the discovery of the cell, 

 the prophetic idea that all beings were descended 

 from a sort of primordial mucilaginous matter 

 (Urschleim) , affecting originally a "vesicular" 



