THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IN BIOLOGY 



where with admiration. And posterity, repudiating the 

 verse which makes the body of the book, yet grants 

 permanent value to the book itself, because, forsooth, 

 its copious explanatory footnotes furnish an outline of 

 the status of almost every department of science of 

 the time. 



But even though he lacked the highest art of the versi- 

 fier, Darwin had, beyond perad venture, the imagination 

 of a poet coupled with profound scientific knowledge ; 

 and it was his poetic insight, correlating organisms seem- 

 ingly diverse in structure, and imbuing the lowliest 

 flower with a vital personality, which led him to sus- 

 pect that there are no lines of demarcation in nature. 

 " Can it be," he queries, " that one form of organism 

 has developed from another ; that different species are 

 really but modified descendants of one parent stock?" 

 The alluring thought nestled in his mind and was nurt- 

 ured there, and grew into a fixed belief, which was 

 given fuller expression in his Zoonomia, and in the 

 posthumous Temple of Nature. But there was little 

 proof of its validity forthcoming that could satisfy any 

 one but a poet, and when Erasmus Darwin died, in 1802, 

 the idea of transmutation of species was still but an un- 

 substantiated dream. 



It was a dream, however, which was not confined to 

 Goethe and Darwin. Even earlier the idea had come 

 more or less vaguely to another great dreamer and 

 worker of Germany, Immanuel Kant, and to several 

 great Frenchmen, including De Maillet, Maupertuis, 

 Robinet, and the famous naturalist Buffon a man who 

 had the imagination of a poet, though his message was 

 couched in most artistic prose. Not long after the mid- 

 dle of the eighteenth century Buffon had put forward 



