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THE PROGRESS OF 



II 



support these views he went a good way beyond 

 the limits of any cautious interpretation of the 

 facts then known. 



Although little acquainted with biological science, 

 Whewell seems to have taken particular pains 

 with that part of his work which deals with the 

 history of geological and biological speculation ; and 

 several chapters of his seventeenth and eighteenth 

 books, which comprise the history of physiology, 

 of comparative anatomy and of the palaetiological 

 sciences, vividly reproduce the controversies of 

 the early days of the Victorian epoch. But here, 

 as in the case of the doctrine of the conservation 

 of energy, the historian of the inductive sciences 

 has no prophetic insight ; not even a suspicion of 

 that which the near future was to bring forth. 

 And those who still repeat the once favourite ob- 

 jection that Darwin's "Origin of Species" is nothing 

 but a new version of the " Philosophic zoologique " 

 will find that, so late as 1844, Whewell had not 

 the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main theorem, 

 even as a logical possibility. In fact, the publication 

 of that theorem by Darwin and Wallace, in 18.")!), 

 took all the biological world by surprise. Neither 

 those who were inclined towards the " progressive 

 transmutation" or "development" doctrine, as 

 it was then called, nor those \\lio were opposed 

 t.. it, hail the slightest suspicion that the tendency 

 to variation in living beings, which all admitted 

 as a matter of fact ; the selective influence of con- 



