590 
French Reactionism in Science . 
[October, 
than any of those we have just considered, the Newtonian 
movement not excepted. When Darwin resuscitated and 
established the doctrine of Organic Evolution he met with 
eager and powerful coadjutors and allies in almost every 
civilised country. The master-minds of Germany, Holland, 
Italy, Austria, flocked to the standard of Development, and 
soon furnished splendid contributions to the evidences of the 
new truth. In America Darwin experienced the same gene- 
ral welcome, save from Agassiz, a Franco-Swiss , deeply imbued 
with French traditions. France alone, among all nations of 
high culture, took up a hostile position. It is true that many 
French naturalists admitted the importance of studying 
Nature in the light of the new revelation ; but the leaders 
of French Science, the Scribes and Pharisees of the Academy, 
the Museum, and the University, would have none of it. 
The Academy of Sciences formally rejected Darwin, and it 
must not be forgotten that in the official eulogium delivered 
on occasion of his death before that august body, by M. de 
Quatrefages, this rejection was not recanted, deplored, apolo- 
gised for as an indiscretion and an error, but upheld and 
justified as an aft of dignified and judicial impartiality ! It 
may be here said that Evolutionism and its modern cham- 
pion have been opposed and denounced in other countries no 
less than in France. True, but by whom ? Darwin’s 
English, German, and American opponents were clergymen, 
lawyers, historians, poets, cultivated men of the world, 
without any special acquaintance with the natural sciences. 
The French hostility to Evolutionism centered in the 
learned institutions, and was presided over by biologists ! 
Here as little as in the case of the recent reform in che- 
mistry can we trace the cause to national jealousy. Darwin 
and Wallace were of course Englishmen, but in the last age 
France had contributed nobly, by the hands of Buffon, and 
especially of Lamarck, to the foundation of the new natural 
history. It would have been open for the Academy of 
Sciences, with a little exaggeration, to have claimed Evolu- 
tionism as “ la biologie Franqaise,” and to have pronounced 
Darwin merely a successor of Lamarck. Some French 
writers have adopted this view, but that the leaders of 
French science should prefer to reject Evolution altogether 
is a problem of some interest. 
Some persons — including a writer in this Journal — suggest 
that the cause of the peculiar attitude taken by France in 
view of Evolutionism, and generally of great scientific 
reforms, may be ethnological. The Celt, they tell us, lives 
in the past as essentially as the Teuton does in the future. 
