THE STORY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE 



lowing. This was Etienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, the 

 famous author of the Philosophic Anatomigue, and for 

 many years the colleague of Lamarck at the Jarclin des 

 Plantes. Like Goethe, Geoffroy was pre-eminently an 

 anatomist, and, like the great German, he had early 

 been impressed with the resemblances between the anal- 

 ogous organs of different classes of beings. He con- 

 ceived the idea that an absolute unity of type prevails 

 throughout organic nature as regards each set of organs. 

 Out of this idea grew his gradually formed belief that 

 similarity of structure might imply identity of origin 

 that, in short, one species of animal might have devel- 

 oped from another. 



Geoffrey's grasp of this idea of transmutation was by 

 no means so complete as that of Lamarck, and he seems 

 never to have fully determined in his own mind just 

 what might be the limits of such development of species. 

 Certainly he nowhere includes all organic creatures in 

 one line of descent, as Lamarck had done; nevertheless 

 he held tenaciously to the truth as he saw it, in open op- 

 position to Cuvier, with whom he held a memorable de- 

 bate at the Academy of Sciences in 1830 the debate 

 which so aroused the interest and enthusiasm of Goethe, 

 but which, in the opinion of nearly every one else, re- 

 sulted in crushing defeat for Geoffroy, and brilliant, 

 seemingly final, victory for the advocate of special cre- 

 ation and the fixity of species. 



With that all ardent controversy over the subject 

 seemed to end, and for just a quarter of a century to 

 come there was published but a single argument for 

 transmutation of species which attracted any general at- 

 tention whatever. This oasis in a desert generation was 

 a little book called Vestiges of the Natural History of 



300 



