I08 EVOLUTIONISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



ine search for a naturalistic explanation of the 

 phenomena of life. 



We find them reviving Greek ideas both in the 

 spontaneous origin of life in different forms and 

 in metamorphoses and transformations, hardly less 

 sudden than those of Empedocles. Another source 

 of their authority is the highly imaginative natural 

 history literature of the Middle Ages. In all this 

 chaff there is of course some wheat, as is often the 

 case in speculation unhindered by observation. Lines 

 of suggestion coming near to modern thought upon 

 heredity are found especially in the essays of Mau- 

 pertuis, who drew from Democritus and Anaxagoras. 

 De Maillet outlined the theory of ' transmission of 

 acquired characters' in a crude form similar to that 

 of Empedocles. Robinet conceived Evolution on 

 a large scale, borrowing a mistaken interpretation of 

 Aristotle. Oken stated somewhat more distinctly 

 than had been done previously the hypothesis of the 

 cellular origin of life. As Bonnet was the contempo- 

 rary of Buffon, and Oken lived thirty years later 

 than Lamarck, the study of this group carries us 

 well beyond the period in which the sound founda- 

 tions of Modern Evolution were laid. 



We are indebted to Ducasse and Varigny for 

 pointing out some of the quaint early biological lit- 

 erature of the seventeenth century. Claude Duret 

 in his Histoire Admirable des Plantes, published in 

 1609, is a direct transformationist. Among other 

 remarkable tales he describes and figures a tree, 'not. 



