First Materials for the Controversy

I HAVE spoken of the celebrated dispute between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in which Goethe was so much interested. Materials for this controversy had been rapidly accumulating during the half century preceding the date when it finally broke out in the French Academy. Indeed, it would be truer to say that materials had been accumulating during two centuries prior to the historic debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. From the time of Bacon, Descartes and Leibnitz, more, far more, had been done towards the development of the Evolution idea than had been effected during all the centuries which had elapsed between the earliest speculations of the Ionian school and the publication of the “Novum Organum.”

We have already learned what geology and paleontology contributed towards the establishment of the theory of Evolution. We have seen how the study of fossils and the careful and long-continued examination of the much-vexed question of spontaneous generation shed a flood of light on numerous problems which were before obscure and mysterious in the extreme. But while Da Vinci, Fracostoro, Palissy, Steno, Generelli, Redi, Malpighi, Leeuwenhoek, Schwammerdam and their compeers, were carrying on their investigations regarding fossils and infusoria, students in other departments of science were not idle. Gesner, Vesalius, Fallopius, Fabricius and Harvey were then conducting their famous researches in zoölogy, anatomy, and embryology, while Cesalpinus, Ray, Tournefort and Linnæus were laying the secure foundations of systematic botany and vegetable anatomy.