THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN 13 



the ' Botanic Journal ' and the c Philosophical Transac- 

 tions/ in treatises on Madeira beetles and the Australian 

 flora, we find everywhere the thoughts of men pro- 

 foundly influenced in a thousand directions by this 

 universal evolutionary solvent and leaven. 



And while the world of thought was thus seething and 

 moving restlessly before the wave of ideas set in motion 

 by these various independent philosophers, another 

 group of causes in another field was rendering smooth 

 the path beforehand for the future champion of the 

 amended evolutionism. Geology on the one hand and 

 astronomy on the other were making men's minds 

 gradually familiar with the conception of slow natural 

 development, as opposed to immediate and miraculous 

 creation. 



The rise of geology had been rapid and brilliant. 

 In the last century it had been almost universally 

 believed that fossil organisms were the relics of sub- 

 merged and destroyed worlds, strange remnants of 

 successive terrible mundane catastrophes. Cuvier 

 himself, who had rendered immense services to geo- 

 logical science by his almost unerring reconstructions 

 of extinct animals, remained a partisan of the old 

 theory of constant cataclysms and fresh creations 

 throughout his whole life ; but Lamarck, here as else- 

 where the prophet of the modern uniformitarian con- 

 cept of nature, had already announced his grand idea 

 that the ordinary process of natural laws sufficed to 

 account for all the phenomena of the earth's crust. In 

 England, William Smith, the ingenious land surveyor, 

 riding up and down on his daily task over the face of 

 the country, became convinced by his observations in 



