*JO HUXLEY 



from the simple to the complex as applied to the 

 cosmos. 



The effect of these discoveries was to produce an 

 unsettled feeling as to the truth of the doctrine of the 

 fixity of species. Lamarck was the most prominent, 

 but not the only, naturalist of the eighteenth century 

 to suggest that the various species had not been sepa- 

 rately created, but had been developed by sundry 

 causes, operating through long ages, from a few 

 simple forms. It was a perilous step in those days of 

 the long-reaching secular arm to throw doubt on the 

 account of the creation contained in a document 

 which God Himself was believed to have inspired ; 

 but the doubt once harboured, a mass of facts telling 

 against the orthodox view came into unwonted sig- 

 nificance. Every scheme of classification hitherto 

 propounded had assumed the immutability of the 

 several groups ; the conception of any fundamental 

 relation of the several types to a common primitive 

 type was unborn ; and the most superficial comparison 

 between the vertebrates, in which some structural re- 

 semblances were obvious, and the loose and confused 

 medley covered by the term invertebrate, was suf- 

 ficient to negative any idea of an underlying unity 

 that might be broached. 



The illustrious Cuvier regarded the several groups 

 as the outcome o*" a preordained plan of the Creator, 



