ntific eminence was deserved; the highest
honours of his own and other countries were given him, and he bore
them worthily. An Imperial Councillor under Napoleon; President of the
Council of Public Instruction and Chancellor of the University under
the restored Bourbons; Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, a Peer of
France, Minister of the Interior, and President of the Council of State
under Louis Philippe; he was eminent in all these capacities, and yet
the dignity given by such high administrative positions was as nothing
compared to his leadership in natural science. Science throughout the
world acknowledged in him its chief contemporary ornament, and to this
hour his fame rightly continues. But there was in him, as in Linnaeus,
a survival of certain theological ways of looking at the universe and
certain theological conceptions of a plan of creation; it must be said,
too, that while his temperament made him distrust new hypotheses, of
which he had seen so many born and die, his environment as a great
functionary of state, honoured, admired, almost adored by the greatest,
not only in the state but in the Church, his solicitude lest science
should receive some detriment by openly resisting the Church, which
had recaptured Europe after the French Revolution, and had made of its
enemies its footstool--all these considerations led him to oppose the
new theory. Amid the plaudits, then, of the foremost church-men he
threw across the path of the evolution doctrines the whole mass of
his authority in favour of the old theory of catastrophic changes and
special creations.

Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire stoutly withstood him, braving non-recognition,
ill-treatment, and ridicule. Treviranus, afar off in his mathematical
lecture-room at Bremen, seemed simply forgotten.

But the current of evolutionary thought could not thus be checked:
dammed up for a time, it broke out in new channels and in ways and
places least expected; turned away from France, it appeared especially
in England, where great paleontologists and geologists arose whose work
culminated in that of Lyell. Specialists throughout all the world now
became more vigorous than ever, gathering facts and thinking upon them
in a way which caused the special creation theory to shrink more and
more. Broader and more full became these various rivulets, soon to unite
in one great stream of thought.

In 1813 Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural selection
to acco