Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/551

Rh also the favorable views already taken of that precedent by writers of recognized respectability.

Moreover, as the passage just cited indicates, Descartes was not the only, though he was the most eminent, predecessor of Kant to set an example of an undertaking similar to that upon which Kant was entering. Hypotheses about the origin of the world or of our planet may be said to have been especially in fashion during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. In the words of Cuvier,

The "Theoria Telluris Sacra," 1681, 1689, and the "Archseologise Philosophies," 1692, of Thomas Burnet, and the "New Theory of the Earth," 1696, of William Whiston—successor to Newton's professorship at Cambridge, effective popularizer of the Newtonian doctrines, and the supposed original of Goldsmith's "Dr. Primrose"—were based upon an incongruous mixture of scientific and scriptural considerations; but they at least made cosmogony a topic of general interest. As much, if little more, can be said of Woodward's "Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies," 1695. But in 1734 there was published at Leipsic a treatise which resembled Laplace's theory much more nearly than did Kant's. The "Principia rerum naturalium" of Swedenborg—already celebrated as a geologist and metallurgist, not yet celebrated as a mystic and religious reformer—enunciated the following theses:

The idea of planetary evolution was thus anything but a novelty in 1755. What is more, the decade immediately preceding the completion of Kant's "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte" may be said to have been especially distinguished by the prominence with which, during it, questions of cosmogony were brought to the attention of the learned world.