FROM LAIVIARCK TO ST. HILAIRE 257 



their economy. They would lead us to a more exact 

 knowledge on the nature of the species and even of 

 the species in general. . . . 



We cannot read the works of Geoffroy St. 

 Hilaire without perceiving that he was by birth 

 a philosopher and by adoption a naturalist. Al- 

 though his theory of the causes of the transmuta- 

 tion of species was profoundly different from that 

 of Lamarck, he belonged to the Buffon-Lamarck 

 school of evolutionary thought, as opposed to 

 the special-creation school of Cuvier; in sup- 

 port of his school he came into wide celebrity 

 by the famous discussion of 1830 in the French 

 Academy of Sciences. He added largely to the 

 evidences of 'filiation' and contributed several 

 entirely original theoretical 'factors' of transfor- 

 mation; nevertheless there is in all his writings 

 an undercurrent of doubt as to the extent of the 

 law of degradation. He was not a radical evolu- 

 tionist like Lamarck. Perrier, Quatref ages, and 

 the younger St. Hilaire have carefully studied 

 his opinions and history. St. Hilaire was a pupil 

 of Buffon, but as a thinker he mainly acknowl- 

 edges his- debt to the German natural philoso- 

 phers and especially to Schelling in his researches 

 upon the philosophy of Nature, although he does 

 not follow Schelling in his advocacy of the supe- 

 riority of the deductive method. 



