NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 369 



animals had long been observed to be strictly obedient to and 

 dependent upon the laws of nature in respect to climate, season, 

 food, reproduction, etc. 



NATURAL THEOLOGY AND AN AGE OF REASON. At the end of 

 the seventeenth century John Ray, an English zoologist, drew 

 attention to the remarkable adaptations everywhere discover- 

 able in nature and especially in plants and animals, and suggested 

 that these adaptations were sufficient to prove the existence of 

 "design" in the universe, a powerful argument in favor of the 

 Mosaic cosmogony. The same idea was urged more at length by 

 others in the eighteenth century as an offset to the growing scep- 

 ticism of the age, and especially by Butler in his great work on 

 the Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Course and 

 Constitution of Nature (1736), and by Paley in his famous Nat- 

 ural Theology (1802). More popular and more radical influences 

 were simultaneously at work in the opposite direction, as for 

 example, Paine's Rights of Man and Age of Reason, while 

 Gibbon with prodigious learning, and Hume with searching philo- 

 sophical criticism, added to the increasing dissatisfaction of the 

 thoughtful with the current cosmogony, a dissatisfaction 

 which had been rapidly growing under the doctrine of the neces- 

 sity of doubt emphasized by Descartes. 



Between 1842 and 1846 appeared a revolutionary work entitled 

 Vestiges of Creation, by an anonymous author, which aroused in- 

 tense interest in scientific circles and a storm of criticism from those 

 who held to the old cosmogony. It is now known to have been 

 written by Robert Chambers, an Edinburgh publisher who pre- 

 ferred to remain unknown from fear of injuring his partners by 

 bringing down upon them the wrath of critics for his heterodoxy. 

 Chambers was an amateur geologist and in his " Vestiges " under- 

 takes to treat the genesis of the earth on more rational and more 

 natural principles than was possible by following the orthodox 

 theory of special creation. 



The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 re- 

 sulted, after a period of earnest and sometimes acrimonious 

 discussion, in the establishment of what is now known as the 

 2n 



