A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



his bare facts, as genius sometimes will, he had insisted 

 that these progressive populations had developed one 

 from another, under influence of changed surroundings, 

 in unbroken series. 



Of course such a thought as this was hopelessly mis- 

 placed in a generation that doubted the existence of ex- 

 tinct species, and hardly less so in the generation that 

 accepted catastrophism ; but it had been kept alive by 

 here and there an advocate like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, 

 and now the banishment of catastrophism opened the 

 way for its more respectful consideration. Respectful 

 consideration was given it by Lyell in each recurring 

 edition of his Principles, but such consideration led to 

 its unqualified rejection. In its place Lyell put forward 

 a modified hypothesis of special creation. He assumed 

 that from time to time, as the extirpation of a species 

 had left room, so to speak, for a new species, such new 

 species had been created de novo; and he supposed that 

 such intermittent, spasmodic impulses of creation mani- 

 fest themselves nowadays quite as frequently as at any 

 time in the past. He did not say in so many words 

 that no one need be surprised to-day were he to see a 

 new species of deer, for example, come up out of the 

 ground before him, "pawing to get free," like Milton's 

 lion, but his theory implied as much. And that theory, 

 let it be noted, was not the theory of Lyell alone, but 

 of nearly all his associates in the geologic world. There 

 is perhaps no other fact that will bring home to one so 

 vividly the advance in thought of our own generation 

 as the recollection that so crude, so almost unthinkable 

 a conception could have been the current doctrine of 

 science less than half a century ago. 



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