56 'WHAT IS A SPECIES?' 



of Paradise Lost (1. 414 et seq.), and Professor Huxley 

 had still earlier suggested the same cause in his American 

 Addresses. I cannot help thinking that the belief had 

 even more to do with the spirit of the age which spoke, 

 and spoke for all time, with Milton for its interpreter — 

 the spirit of the Puritan movement, with its insistence 

 on literal interpretation and verbal inspiration. 



John Ray was Milton's younger contemporary, and 

 many writers, including Aubrey Moore, have thought 

 that with him began the idea of the fixity of species. 

 Sir William Thiselton-Dyer has, however, recently 

 pointed out, that a conception similar to Ray's may be 

 traced to Kaspar Bauhin (1 550-1624), and to Jung 

 (1587-1657).' 



From Ray we pass to Linnaeus with his celebrated 

 definition. Of the Ray-Linnaeus-Cuvier conception of 

 species which found its most precise and authoritative 

 expression in the Latin sentence quoted on p. 54, Dr. 

 F. A. Dixey has well said that it ' left order where it had 

 found confusion, but in substituting exactness of definition 

 for the vague conceptions of a former age, it did much to 

 obscure the rudimentary notions of organic evolution 

 which had influenced naturalists and philosophers from 

 Aristotle downwards'- 2 At the same time it is by no 

 means improbable, as Dixey has suggested, that the 

 Linnaean conception ' of the reality and fixity of species 

 perhaps marks a necessary stage in the progress of 

 scientific inquiry '. 3 



The Linnaean idea of special creation has no place in 

 the realm of science; it is a theological dogma. The 

 formation of species, said Darwin in a letter to Lyell, 

 ' has hitherto been viewed as beyond law ; in fact, this 

 branch of science is still with most people under its 

 theological phase of development.' 4 And this explains 



1 The Edinburgh Review, October, 1902, p. 370. 



2 Nature, June 19, 1902, p. 169. For the history of these early ideas 

 upon evolution see From the Greeks to Darwin, by H. F. Osborn, New 

 York, 1894. 



3 Church Quarterly Review, October, 1902, Art. II, p. 28. 



" Letter 132 to C. Lyell, August 21, 1861. More Letters of Charles 

 Darwin, London, 1903, i, p. 194. 



