THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



relief in this generation as the exponents of the idea of 

 transmutation of species, there are a few others which 

 must not be altogether overlooked in this connection. 

 Of these the most conspicuous is that of Gottfried Rein- 

 hold Treviranus, a German naturalist physician, profess- 

 or of mathematics in the lyceum at Bremen. 



It was an interesting coincidence that Treviranus 

 should have published the first volume of his Biologie, 

 oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, in which his views 

 on the transmutation of species were expounded, in 1802, 

 the same twelvemonth in which Lamarck's first exposi- 

 tion of the same doctrine appeared in his Reclierches sur 

 V Organisation des Corps Vivants. It is singular, too, 

 that Lamarck, in his Hydrogeologie of the same date, 

 should independently have suggested " biology " as an 

 appropriate word to express the general science of living 

 things. It is significant of the tendency of thought of 

 the time that the need of such a unifying word should 

 have presented itself simultaneously to independent 

 thinkers in different countries. 



That same memorable year, Lorenz Oken, another 

 philosophical naturalist, professor in the University of 

 Zurich, published the preliminary outlines of his Phi- 

 losophie der Natur, which, as developed through later 

 publications, outlined a theory of spontaneous generation 

 and of evolution of species. Thus it appears that this 

 idea was germinating in the minds of several of the 

 ablest men of the time during the first decade of our 

 century. But the singular result of their various expli- 

 cations was to give sudden check to that undercurrent 

 of thought which for some time had been setting tow- 

 ards this conception. As soon as it was made clear 

 whither the concession that animals may be changed by 



