t
was translated even into Japanese and Hindustani; the stagnation of
scientific thought, which Buckle, only a few years before, had so deeply
lamented, gave place to a widespread and fruitful activity; masses of
accumulated observations, which had seemed stale and unprofitable,
were made alive; facts formerly without meaning now found their
interpretation. Under this new influence an army of young men took
up every promising line of scientific investigation in every land.
Epoch-making books appeared in all the great nations. Spencer, Wallace,
Huxley, Galton, Tyndall, Tylor, Lubbock, Bagehot, Lewes, in England,
and a phalanx of strong men in Germany, Italy, France, and America gave
forth works which became authoritative in every department of biology.
If some of the older men in France held back, overawed perhaps by the
authority of Cuvier, the younger and more vigorous pressed on.

One source of opposition deserves to be especially mentioned--Louis
Agassiz.

A great investigator, an inspired and inspiring teacher, a noble man, he
had received and elaborated a theory of animated creation which he could
not readily change. In his heart and mind still prevailed the atmosphere
of the little Swiss parsonage in which he was born, and his religious
and moral nature, so beautiful to all who knew him, was especially
repelled by sundry evolutionists, who, in their zeal as neophytes, made
proclamations seeming to have a decidedly irreligious if not immoral
bearing. In addition to this was the direction his thinking had received
from Cuvier. Both these influences combined to prevent his acceptance of
the new view.

He was the third great man who had thrown his influence as a barrier
across the current of evolutionary thought. Linnaeus in the second half
of the eighteenth century, Cuvier in the first half, and Agassiz in the
second half of the nineteenth--all made the same effort. Each remains
great; but not all of them together could arrest the current. Agassiz's
strong efforts throughout the United States, and indeed throughout
Europe, to check it, really promoted it. From the great museum he had
founded at Cambridge, from his summer school at Penikese, from his
lecture rooms at Harvard and Cornell, his disciples went forth full of
love and admiration for him, full of enthusiasm which he had stirred
and into fields which he had indicated; but their powers, which he had
aroused and strengthened, were devoted to developing the t