332 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



Goethe, the great poet, was never a declared advocate of organic 

 transformation, although he discussed it during his last years under 

 the influence of the French transformationists. E. von Baer, the 

 celebrated founder of embryology, became, especially after Darwin, a 

 convinced transformationist; indeed he came very near recognizing 

 evolution as a universal process. 



At the beginning and in the first half of the nineteenth century, 

 the doctrine of organic evolution was developed by the scientists in 

 France in a manner much more definite than in Germany. It is 

 especially Lamarck who contributed the most to this development 

 in his " Philosophie zoologique," 1809, and in some earlier essays (the 

 first one is dated 1801). Discussing the idea of species, Lamarck 

 directs special attention to the artificial nature of this idea; to the 

 numerous transitions from one species to another; to the fact of 

 varieties and the connection of these varieties with different external 

 circumstances ; to the short duration of the life of existent species so 

 far as we can establish the stability of these species. These are the 

 principal arguments which he presents in favor of transmutability of 

 species. While insisting upon the slow but continuous evolution of 

 the earth's surface, he gains a partial idea of the direct connection 

 which exists between this evolution and that of the organic world. 

 But it is especially in the exposition of the causes of organic evolu- 

 tion that the work of Lamarck presents an extraordinary originality ; 

 a part of his work which we can not discuss here. 



Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire united with his theory of the unity of 

 plan, the doctrine of organic transformism, attributing the cause of 

 these transformations to the ambient world. 



But while Lamarck and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire represent the doc- 

 trine of transformism, the opposing doctrine, that of the creation of 

 species, has nowhere found advocates more enthusiastic and distin- 

 guished than Cuvier and Agassiz. 



When once this last doctrine had been expressly introduced into 

 natural history by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, Cuvier set him- 

 self to demonstrate it by observed facts. In linking the doctrine of 

 fixity of species to that of the successive revolutions of the globe, he 

 taught a series of successive creations of species; but, according to 

 him, some of these species are not exterminated by the revolutions, 

 and there have always been migrations of some species that survived. 

 Above all, Agassiz became the typical advocate of the creation 

 theory, teaching that God produced, in different geological periods, 

 organic species more and more perfect, which, once created, remained 

 unchanged. 



Auguste Comte, founder of the positivist philosophy, although a 

 resolute advocate of the intellectual and social evolution — especially 



