in his _Pioneers of
Evolution_.

Poets, from Empedocles and Lucretius to Goethe and Tennyson, have sought
in their verses to illustrate the beauty of evolutionary ideas; and
philosophers, from Aristotle and Strabo to Kant and Herbert Spencer,
have recognised the principle of evolution as harmonising with, and
growing out of, the highest conceptions of science. Yet it was not till
the Nineteenth Century that any serious attempts were made to establish
the hypothesis of evolution as a definite theory, based on sound
reasoning from careful observation.

It is true that there were men, in advance of their age, who in some
cases anticipated to a certain extent this work of establishing the
doctrine of evolution on a firm foundation. Thus in Italy, the earliest
home of so many sciences, a Carmelite friar, Generelli, reasoning on
observations made by his compatriots Fracastoro and Leonardo da Vinci in
the Sixteenth Century, Steno and Scilla in the Seventeenth, and Lazzaro
Moro and Marsilli in the Eighteenth Century, laid the foundations of a
rational system of geology in a work published in 1749 which was
characterised alike by courage and eloquence. In France, the illustrious
Nicolas Desmarest, from his study of the classical region of the
Auvergne, was able to show, in 1777, how the river valleys of that
district had been carved out by the rivers that flow in them. Nor were
there wanting geologists with similar previsions in Germany and
Switzerland.

But none of these early exponents of geological theory came so near to
anticipating the work of the Nineteenth Century as did the illustrious
James Hutton, whose 'Theory of the Earth,' a first sketch of which was
published in 1785, was a splendid exposition of evolution as applied to
the inorganic world. Unfortunately, Hutton's theory was linked to the
extravagancies of what was known at that day as 'Vulcanism' or
'Plutonism,' in contradistinction to the 'Neptunism' of Werner. Hutton,
while rejecting the Wernerian notion of "the aqueous precipitation of
basalt," maintained the equally fanciful idea that the consolidation of
all strata--clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestones and even
rock-salt--must be ascribed to the action of heat, and that even the
formation of chalk-flints and the silicification of fossil wood were due
to the injection of molten silica!

What was still more unfortunate in Hutton's case was that, in his
enthusiasm, he used expressions which led to h