Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/717

Rh some time read, or looked over, the "Origin of Species;" but there is not a word in these lectures which might not have been written by one who had never heard of that book, or of the arguments which made the publication of it the beginning of a new epoch in the history of science.

Not only is it that Prof. Agassiz does not attack the Darwinian theory in these lectures; it is also that, until the ninth lecture, he does not allude to the doctrine of Evolution in any way. His first eight lectures consist mostly in an account of the development of the embryo in various animals; and in this we have a pure description of facts with which no one certainly will feel like quarrelling, so far as theories are concerned. He goes to work, very much as Max Müller does, in lecturing about the science of language, when he gives you a maximum of interesting etymologies and a minimum of real philosophizing which goes to the bottom of things. But Prof. Agassiz is not so interesting or so stimulating in his discourse as Max Müller. He does not lead us into pleasant fields of illustration, where we would fain tarry longer, forgetting the main purpose of the discussion in our delight at the unessential matters which occupy our attention. On the contrary, it seems to me that Prof. Agassiz's explanation of the development of eggs is rather tedious and dry, and by no means richly fraught with novel suggestions. The exposition is a commonplace one, such as is good for students in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, who are beginning to study embryology, but there are no features which make it especially interesting or instructive to any one who has already served an apprenticeship in these matters.

In his ninth lecture, Prof. Agassiz begins to make some allusion to the development theory—not to the development theory as it now stands since the publication of the "Origin of Species," but to the development theory as it stood in the days when Prof. Agassiz was a young student, when Cuvier and the elder Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire waged fierce warfare in the French Academy, and when the aged Goethe, sanest and wisest of men, foresaw in the issue of that battle the speedy triumph of the development theory. Beyond this point, I will venture to say, Prof. Agassiz has never travelled. The doctrine of Evolution is still, to him, what it was in those early days; and all the discoveries and reasonings of Mr. Darwin have passed by him unheeded and unnoticed. He arrived too early at that rigidity of mind which prevents us from properly comprehending new theories, and which we should all of us dread.

What, now, is the doctrine which Prof. Agassiz begins to attack, in his ninth lecture, and what is the doctrine which he would propose as a substitute? The doctrine which he attacks is simply this—that all organic beings have come into existence through some natural process of causation; and the doctrine which he defends is just this—that all organic beings, as classed in species, have come into existence at