302 THE HISTORY AND SCOPE OF ZOOLOGY IX 



The delay in the establishment of the doctrine of 

 organic evolution was due, not to the ignorant and 

 unobservant, but to the leaders of zooloo^ical and 

 botanical science. Knowing as they did the almost 

 endless complexity of organic structures, realising as 

 they did that man himself with all the mystery of his 

 life and consciousness must be included in any explana- 

 tion of the origin of living things, they preferred to 

 regard living things as something apart from the rest 

 of nature, specially cared for, specially created by a 

 Divine Being, rather than to indulge in hypotheses 

 which seemed to be beyond all possibility of proof, 

 and were rather of the nature of poets' dreams than 

 in accordance with the principles of that new philo- 

 sophy of rigid adherence to fact and demonstration 

 which had hitherto served as the mainsprings of scien- 

 tific progress. Thus it was that the so-called " Natur- 

 philosophen" of the last decade of the eighteenth 

 century, and their successors in the first quarter of 

 the nineteenth, found few adherents among the working 

 zoologists and botanists. Lamarck, Treviranus, Eras- 

 mus Darwin, Goethe, and Saint-Hilaire j^reached to 

 deaf ears, for they advanced the theory that living- 

 beings had developed by a slow process of transmuta- 

 tion in successive generations from simpler ancestors, 

 and in the beginning from simplest formless matter, 

 without being able to demonstrate any existing 

 mechanical causes by which such development must 

 necessarily be brought about. They were met in fact 

 by the criticism that possibly such a development had 

 taken place ; but, as no one could show as a simple 



