130 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
the voleanic fluid of the interior of earth. Lyell thus demon- 
strated a continuous and uninterrupted connection of the 
- whole history of the earth, and he proved it so irrefutably, 
and established so convincingly the supremacy of the “ ex- 
isting causes,” that is, of the causes which are still active 
in the transformation of the earth’s crust, that Geology in 
a short time completely renounced Cuvier’s hypothesis. 
Now, it is remarkable that Paleontology, the science of 
petrifactions, so far as it was pursued by botanists and zoolo- 
gists, remained apparently unaffected by this great progress 
in geology. Biology still continued to assume repeated new 
creations of the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms, at 
the beginning of every new period of the earth’s history, 
although this hypothesis of individual creations, shoved into 
the world one after the other, without the assumption of 
Cuvier’s cataclysms, became pure nonsense, and lost its 
foundation. It is evidently perfectly absurd to assume a 
distinct new creation of the whole world of animals and 
plants at definite epochs, without the crust of the earth 
itself experiencing any considerable general revolution. 
And although this conception is most closely connected 
with Cuvier’s theory of catastrophes, still it prevailed when 
the latter had been completely destroyed and abandoned. 
It was reserved for the great English naturalist, Charles 
Darwin, to remove this contradiction, and to show that the 
organic beings of the earth have a history as continuous and 
connected as the inorganic crust of the earth; that animals 
and plants have arisen from one another by as gradual a 
transmutation as that by which the varying forms of the 
earth’s crust, the forms of the continents, and of the seas. 
surrounding and separating them, have arisen out of earlier 
