in the
modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind
of every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is
competent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should
it not account for the living part?

By keeping this question before the public for some thirty years,
Lyell, though the keenest and most formidable of the opponents of the
transmutation theory, as it was formulated by Lamarck, was of the
greatest possible service in facilitating the reception of the sounder
doctrines of a later day. And, in like fashion, another vehement
opponent of the transmutation of species, the elder Agassiz, was
doomed to help the cause he hated. Agassiz not only maintained the
fact of the progressive advance in organisation of the inhabitants of
the earth at each successive geological epoch, but he insisted upon
the analogy of the steps of this progression with those by which the
embryo advances to the adult condition, among the highest forms of
each group. In fact, in endeavoring to support these views he went a
good way beyond the limits of any cautious interpretation of the facts
then known.

[Sidenote: Darwin]

Although little acquainted with biological science, Whewell seems to
have taken particular pains with that part of his work which deals
with the history of geological and biological speculation; and several
chapters of his seventeenth and eighteenth books, which comprise the
history of physiology, of comparative anatomy and of the
palaetiological sciences, vividly reproduce the controversies of the
early days of the Victorian epoch. But here, as in the case of the
doctrine of the conservation of energy, the historian of the inductive
sciences has no prophetic insight; not even a suspicion of that which
the near future was to bring forth. And those who still repeat the
once favorite objection that Darwin's 'Origin of Species' is nothing
but a new version of the 'Philosophie zoologique' will find that, so
late as 1844, Whewell had not the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main
theorem, even as a logical possibility. In fact, the publication of
that theorem by Darwin and Wallace, in 1859, took all the biological
world by surprise. Neither those who were inclined towards the
'progressive transmutation' or 'development' doctrine, as it was then
called, nor those who were opposed to it, had the slightest suspicion
that the tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitt