s had developed one from another, under influence of changed
surroundings, in unbroken series.

Of course such a thought as this was hopelessly misplaced in a
generation that doubted the existence of extinct species, and hardly
less so in the generation that accepted catastrophism; but it had been
kept alive by here and there an advocate like Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire,
and now the banishment of catastrophism opened the way for its more
respectful consideration. Respectful consideration was given it by Lyell
in each recurring edition of his Principles, but such consideration led
to its unqualified rejection. In its place Lyell put forward a modified
hypothesis of special creation. He assumed that from time to time,
as the extirpation of a species had left room, so to speak, for a new
species, such new species had been created de novo; and he supposed that
such intermittent, spasmodic impulses of creation manifest themselves
nowadays quite as frequently as at any time in the past. He did not say
in so many words that no one need be surprised to-day were he to see a
new species of deer, for example, come up out of the ground before him,
"pawing to get free," like Milton's lion, but his theory implied as
much. And that theory, let it be noted, was not the theory of Lyell
alone, but of nearly all his associates in the geologic world. There is
perhaps no other fact that will bring home to one so vividly the advance
in thought of our own generation as the recollection that so crude, so
almost unthinkable a conception could have been the current doctrine of
science less than half a century ago.

This theory of special creation, moreover, excluded the current doctrine
of uniformitarianism as night excludes day, though most thinkers of the
time did not seem to be aware of the incompatibility of the two ideas.
It may be doubted whether even Lyell himself fully realized it. If he
did, he saw no escape from the dilemma, for it seemed to him that
the record in the rocks clearly disproved the alternative Lamarckian
hypothesis. And almost with one accord the paleontologists of the
time sustained the verdict. Owen, Agassiz, Falconer, Barrande, Pictet,
Forbes, repudiated the idea as unqualifiedly as their great predecessor
Cuvier had done in the earlier generation. Some of them did, indeed,
come to believe that there is evidence of a progressive development of
life in the successive ages, but no such graded series of fossils had
been disco