AGASSIZ ON CREATION. 61 
theory of cataclysms, and pointed to a perfectly continuous 
and uninterrupted developmental history of all the organic 
inhabitants of the earth through allages. They maintained 
that the animal and vegetable species of each period were 
derived from those of the preceding period, and were only 
the altered descendants of the former. This true conception, 
however, being opposed to Cuvier’s great authority, was 
then unable to make way. Nay, even after Cuvier’s theory 
of catastrophies had been completely cast out from the 
domain of geology by Lyell’s classic Principles of Geology, 
which appeared in 1830, still his idea of the specific dis- 
tinctness of a series of organic creations maintained its 
influence, in many ways, in the science of Palzontology. 
(Gen. Morph. ii. 312.) 
By a curious coincidence, thirteen years ago, almost at 
the same time that Cuvier’s History of Creation received its 
death-blow by Darwin’s book, another celebrated naturalist 
made an attempt to re-establish it, and to adopt it in the 
roughest manner, as a part of a teleologico-theological 
system of nature. This was the Swiss geologist, Louis 
Agassiz, who attained a great reputation by his theory 
of glaciers and the ice-period, borrowed from Schimper and 
Charpentier, and who has been living in North America for 
many years. He commenced in 1858 to publish a work 
planned on a very large scale, which bears the title of 
“ Contributions to the Natural History of the United States 
of North America.” The first volume of this work, although 
large and costly, owing to the patriotism of the Americans, 
had an unprecedented sale ; its title is, “An Essay on Classi- 
fication.” § 
In this essay Agassiz not only discusses the natural series 
