that which actually was its manner of
coming into existence. In the eighteenth century, Kant put forth a
remarkable speculation as to the origin of the solar system, closely
similar to that subsequently adopted by Laplace and destined to become
famous under the title of the 'nebular hypothesis.'

The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian
geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the
speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his
'Theorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show
that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of
processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in
relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies
from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The
abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this
revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a
practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the
way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the
ancient theory of evolution.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first
serious attempt to apply the doctrine to the living world. In the
latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Treviranus, and Lamarck
took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The
question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the
fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier
and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological
evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the
greatest naturalist of the age with their ecclesiastical opponents.
Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more
short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution.

Lyell and Poulett Scrope, in this country, resumed the work of the
Italians and of Hutton; and the former, aided by a marvellous power of
clear exposition, placed upon an irrefragable basis the truth that
natural causes are competent to account for all events, which can be
proved to have occurred, in the course of the secular changes which
have taken place during the deposition of the stratified rocks. The
publication of 'The Principles of Geology,' in 1830, constituted an
epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch