There is no fact in the history of science which is more certain than that those great pioneers of Evolution in the Inorganic world—Generelli, Desmarest and Hutton—utterly failed to recommend their doctrines to general acceptance; and that, at the beginning of last century, everything in the nature of evolutionary ideas was almost universally discredited —alike by men of science and the world at large.

The causes of the neglect and opprobrium which befel all evolutionary teachings are not difficult to discover. The old Greek philosophers saw no more reason to doubt the possibility of creation by evolution, than by direct mechanical means. But, on the revival of learning in Europe, evolution was at once confronted by the cosmogonies of Jewish and Arabian writers, which were incorporated in sacred books; and not only were the ideas of the sudden making and destruction of the world and all things in it regarded as revealed truth, but the periods of time necessary for evolution could not be admitted by those who believed the beginning of the world to have been recent, and its end to be imminent. Thus ‘Catastrophic’ ideas came to be regarded as orthodox, and evolutionary ones as utterly irreligious and damnable.

There are few more curious facts in the history of science than the contrast between the reception of the teaching of the Saxon professor Werner, and those of Hutton, the Scotch philosopher, his great rival.