1883.] 
( 6og ) 
ANALYSES OF BOOKS. 
Darwin considered as regards the Causes of his Success and the 
Importance of his Works.* By M. Alph. De Candolle. 
Geneva : H. Georg, University Publisher. 
In this little work the distinguished author gives a vivid and 
truthful survey of the condition of the organic sciences shortly 
before the time when the “ Origin of Species” made its appear- 
ance. Naturalists had become profoundly dissatisfied with the 
labour of describing and distinguishing species. They were 
driven to admit that the limits of species became the more 
vague and fluctuating the more closely examined. The alleged 
physiological criterion, the power of mutual reproduction, broke 
down. Thus M. Naudin showed that two species of Luffa , 
clearly distinCt morphologically, were yet capable of mutual 
fecundation. Palaeontological discoveries showed a successive 
diversity of beings which could not be accounted for by Cuvier’s 
theatrical hypothesis of sudden, successive creations and extir- 
pations. The author, four years before the appearance of 
Darwin’s great work, showed (“ Geographic Botanique Raison- 
nee ”) the appearance, in certain cases, of new forms derived 
from former ones, and proved further that species had passed 
through and survived geological and climatic changes. At 
the same time the astronomical notion of unlimited time, the 
embryological researches of Baer, and the more intelligent study 
of monstrosities, all combined to shake the unsatisfactory fabric 
of the Old Natural History. The hour therefore had come, 
when the man appeared. Half a century earlier Darwin — like 
Lamarck, Oken, Goethe, Wells, or his own grandfather Erasmus 
— would have found the world not prepared for his revelations. 
We cannot omit here to notice a brief digression. M. De 
Candolle calls attention to a forgotten writer, A. M. Duchesne, 
who, in a “ Natural History of the Strawberry,” published 
twenty-four years before Goethe’s “ Metamorphosis of Plants,” 
and thirty-five years before the earliest of Lamarck’s works, an- 
nounced that “the genealogical order is the only one which 
Nature indicates, the only one which fully satisfies the mind ; 
every other classification is arbitrary and void of ideas.” He 
even proceeded to draw up a genealogical tree of the strawberry, 
much as is now done for animal groups by Prof. Haeckel and 
* Darwin considere au point de vue des Causes de son Succes et de 
l’lmportance £e ses Travaux. 
