world was developed from a common original germ. LITTLE 

 Qln 1794, Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles JOURNEYS 

 Darwin, inspired by Kant and Goethe, put forth his 

 book, "Zoonomia," wherein he maintained the grad- 

 ual growth and evolution of all organisms from minute 

 unseen germs. These views were put forth more as a 

 poetic hypothesis than as a well-grounded scientific 

 fact, so little attention was paid to Erasmus Darwin's 

 books. The fanciful accounts of creation put forth by 

 Moses three thousand years before were firmly main- 

 tained by the entrenched volunteers and their millions 

 of devotees and followers. 



But Kant, Goethe, Von Baer, and Geoffrey Saint-Hil- 

 aire were planting their outposts throughout the civ- 

 ilized world, honeycombing Christendom with doubt. 

 Q In 1852, Herbert Spencer had argued in public and 

 in pamphlets, that species have undergone changes 

 and modifications through change of surroundings, and 

 that the account of Noah and his ark with pairs of 

 everything that flew, crept or ran was fanciful and ab- 

 surd, so far as we cared to distinguish fact from fiction. 

 Q Early in the year 1858, Charles Darwin received from 

 his friend, Alfred Russel "Wallace, a paper entitled, 

 " On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely 

 from the Original Type." At this time Darwin had in 

 the hands of the secretary of the Linnaeus Society, a 

 paper entitled, " On the Tendency of Species to Form 

 Varieties, or the Perpetuation of Species and Varieties 

 by Means of Natural Selection." 



The similarity in title as well as the similarity in treat - 



89 



