ST. HILAIRE. igy 



that of Cuvier, and in support of this school liis 

 name came into wide celebrity by the famous dis- 

 cussion of 1830 in the French Academy of Sciences, 

 to which Goethe alluded. He added largely to 

 the evidences of 'filiation' and contributed sev- 

 eral entirely original theoretical 'factors' of trans- 

 formation; nevertheless, there is an undercurrent 

 of doubt as to the extent of the law of Evolution, 

 in all his writings. He was not a radical evolution- 

 ist like Lamarck. 



Perrier, Quatrefages, and the younger St. Hilaire 

 have carefully studied his opinions and historv. 

 St. Hilaire w^as a pupil of Buff on, but as a thinker 

 he mainly acknowledges his debt to the German 

 Natural Philosophers and especially to Schelling 

 in his researches upon the philosophy of Nature; 

 althouQ-h he does not follow Schellino: in his advo- 

 cacy of the superiority of the deductive method. 



St. Hilaire's method was professedly inductive. 

 Ideas, he said, should be directly engendered by 

 facts. His conceptions were often a priori, but his 

 demonstrations were always a posteriori. In his 

 speculation upon Evolution, we see that St. Hilaire 

 was by no means always consistent with his method, 

 but was very largely influenced by certain classes 

 of facts which came under his direct observation, 

 and reasoned from these to laws touching facts of 

 quite a distinct character. Goethe says of him: 

 "He recalls Buffon in some points of view. He 

 does not stop at Nature existing or achieved ; he 



