Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/602

584 the air long before Darwin. When Emerson speaks of the worm mounting through the various spheres of form, we are sometimes told that in this and other similar remarks he anticipated Darwin. But such language is misleading. Great writers might have gone on until the present moment expressing a conviction that higher forms of life have been evolved from lower forms, but all that would have been of small avail as scientific doctrine until somebody could show how it has been done. The belief in an evolution of higher from lower organisms was held by a few eminent men of science for a great part of the century preceding Mr. Darwin's discovery. It is a belief that could not fail to be strongly suggested to minds of a certain philosophic cast as soon as the classification of plants and animals had begun to be conducted upon scientific principles. It is not for nothing that a table of classes, orders, families, genera, and species, when graphically laid out, resembles a family tree. It was not long after Linnaeus that believers in some sort of a development theory, often fantastic enough, began to appear. Palæontology gave further suggestions in the same direction. When Cuvier brought palæontology into alliance with systematic zoölogy, and effected his grand classification of animals in space and time, he prepared the way most thoroughly for a theory of evolution, though he always resisted any such inference from his work. He builded better than he knew. A general belief in development, as opposed to special creations, was held by Mr. Darwin's distinguished grandfather in England, by Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France, and by Oken and Goethe in Germany. In the present age it was maintained in print by Herbert Spencer in 1852, before Darwin had published anything on the subject.

During the early part of the present century applications of the comparative method in various directions were rapidly educating the minds of the younger generation of students into a vague perception of development as something characteristic of all sorts of phenomena. The first two great triumphs of the comparative method were achieved contemporaneously in two fields of inquiry very remote from one another: the one was the work of Cuvier just mentioned, the other was the founding of the comparative philology of the Aryan languages by Franz Bopp in 1816. The work of Bopp exerted as powerful an influence throughout all the historical fields of study as Cuvier exerted in biology. The young men whose minds were receiving their formative impulses between 1825 and 1840, under the various influences of Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire, Lyell, Goethe, Bopp, and other such great leaders, began themselves to come to the foreground as leaders of thought about 1800, on the one hand, such men as Darwin, Gray, Huxley, and Wallace; on the other hand, such as Kuhn and Schleicher,