EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS 179 



servation to hypothesis that he may be placed as 

 one of the most extreme and irrational of this 

 group. His work, De la Nature, is one of the 

 greatest curiosities of natural history literature ; 

 he gives a long and serious catalogue of stones 

 and other inorganic objects which bear acciden- 

 tal and remote resemblances to the various bodily 

 organs of man and the lower animals. These are 

 figured and seriously described, together with 

 monsters of various kinds and mermaids well 

 authenticated, as some of the early trials of Na- 

 ture in the attempt to produce man. 



In one of his general principles — namely, that 

 of Continuity — liobinet was sound. Like Leib- 

 nitz and unlike Bonnet and de Maillet, he was a 

 uniformitarian. Nature, he says, never advances 

 by leaps. He applies this, however, to the origin 

 of life, and says there is no break between the or- 

 ganic and inorganic. The law of Continuity ap- 

 plies to germs of inanimate as well as of animate 

 matter — ^these germs are capable of developing 

 into every possible form; thus, all matter is liv- 

 ing and there is only one kingdom — the Animal 

 Kingdom. The germs develop from the simplest 

 to the most complex, and animals thus arising 

 form a continuous chain of beings, of which the 

 first link is a prototype of the utmost simplicity. 

 Germs, we see, being infinitely small and placed 

 far beyond the reach of experimental affirmation 



