EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS 173 



narrated in the present volume. The passage on 

 ^selection' is contained in an imaginary dialogue 

 upon the teleological view of Nature between 

 Professor Saunderson and a minister of religion : 



I may at least ask of you, for example, who told 

 you — you and Leibnitz and Clarke and Ne\vi:on — 

 that in the first instances of the formation of animals, 

 some were not without heads and others without 

 feet? I may maintain . . . that all the faulty com- 

 binations of matter disappeared, and that those only 

 survived whose mechanism implied no important mis- 

 adaptation (contradiction), and who had the power 

 of supporting and perpetuating themselves. 



Bonnet (1720-1793) 



Charles Bonnet, a Swiss naturalist, was in no 

 modern sense an evolutionist, although he was 

 long known as such in quite another sense. He 

 derived the term evolution from the Latin verb 

 e-volvo to characterize his remarkable theory of 

 life, which was an adaptation to embryology of 

 Leibnitz' philosophy of ^continuity.' The term 

 became a nomen nudum when the doctrine of 

 'evolution' replaced that of *epigenesis,' and was 

 finally taken up by, and applied as appropriate 

 to, our modern doctrine of embryonic develop- 

 ment. 



We may recall, in passing, the great and pro- 

 longed discussions during the eighteenth and the 



