12 CHARLES DARWIN 



Lamarck's great work, the ' Philosophic Zoologique/ 

 though opposed by the austere and formal genius of the 

 immortal Cuvier a reactionary biological conservative 

 and obscurantist, equal to the enormous task of map- 

 ping out piecemeal with infinite skill and power the 

 separate provinces of his chosen science, but incapable 

 of taking in all the bearings of the whole field at a 

 single vivid and comprehensive sweep Lamarck's great 

 work produced a deep and lasting impression upon 

 the entire subsequent course of evolutionary thought 

 in scientific Europe. True, owing to the retrograde 

 tendencies of the First Empire, it caused but little 

 immediate stir at the precise moment of its first publica- 

 tion ; but the seed it sowed sank deep, and, lying fallow 

 long in men's minds, bore fruit at last in the next gener- 

 ation with the marvellous fecundity of the germs of 

 genius. Indeed, from the very beginning of the present 

 century, a ferment of inquiry on the subject of creation 

 and evolution was everywhere obvious among speculative 

 thinkers. The profound interest which Goethe took in 

 the dispute on this very subject in the French Academie 

 des Sciences between Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, 

 amid the thundering guns of a threatened European 

 convulsion, was but a solitary symptom of the general 

 stir which preceded the gestation and birth of the Dar- 

 winian hypothesis. It is impossible to take up any 

 scientific memoirs or treatises of the first half of our own 

 century without seeing at a glance how every mind of 

 high original scientific importance was permeated and 

 disturbed by the fundamental questions aroused, but 

 not fully answered, by Buffon, Lamarck, and Erasmus 

 Darwin. In Lyell's letters and in Agassiz's lectures, in 



