94 PERIOD IV. 



of Lyell and the whole school which stood out for 

 historical continuity, treated history of every kind as a 

 process of development, extended almost without limit 

 the duration of life on the earth, and enforced the 

 obvious but neg-lected truth that results of any 

 magnitude whatever may proceed from small causes 

 operating through a sufficient length of time. 



Darwin's main contentions are now accepted by the 

 scientific world, and Cuvier's hostility to particular 

 forms of evolution has become a mere historical episode 

 of no lasting importance. Angry disputes concerning 

 the weight of his authority are at an end ; he is not to 

 be blamed because thirty years after his death he was 

 set up as judge of a cause which he had not heard. 

 We are now ready to make fair allowance for the time 

 in which his lot was cast — an age when geology, 

 embryology, palaeontology, and distribution were mere 

 infants, some of them hardly yet born. We can also 

 admit without reserve the incompetence of certain of 

 Cuvier's antagonists, and justify the severity with which 

 he treated unity of type as stated and defended by 

 Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Now that the dust of controversy 

 has settled, we are chiefly concerned to inquire : What 

 of all Cuvier's work has proved to be really permanent ? 

 His zoolog)'^ and his comparative anatomy have had to 

 be completely re-cast, partly because of the new light 

 thrown on them by embryology and the doctrine of 

 descent with modification. His studies of extinct 

 vertebrates, however, called into existence a new 

 science, the science of Palajontology,^ and it is mainly 



* Cuvier did not himself use the word palaeontology, which first 

 came in about 1S30. In the same way BuiTon writes on the 

 history of animals, not on zoology ^ and on the theory of the earth, 

 not on geology. 



