CHAPTER VII

THE HISTORY OF NATURE

BOTH CHEMISTRY AND BIOLOGY are eighteenth-century sciences in inspiration. Chemistry, the science of matter, has remained true to the rationalism which gave it form. Biology, on the other hand, etymologically the science of life, has redirected (or betrayed) the impulse it took from romantic idealism. It offers a more general illustration than oxygen of the treachery of facts to names. The word biology was coined by Lamarck in 1802 to lend cosmic unity to natural history, that descriptive study of living nature which classified detail until the mind reeled in boredom along ordered rows of trivia. But the theory of natural selection, by which Charles Darwin explained the evidence for organic evolution, assimilated the development of life to its circumstances in objective nature. The theological issue obscured this deeper question at the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species. Now, however, that the implications of that deceptively unassuming book have been understood in their full generality, biology is no longer to be partitioned off as the science of life. It is a science of nature, and the boundary between life and nature becomes one of narrowing ignorance rather than of principle. Quite generally, indeed, the historical movement of modern science has transferred the arena where unity reigns from nature into science itself, until in positivism the ancient assertion that there are no boundaries or jumps applies rather to science than to the nature it objectifies, or alienates, or even (as romantics would say) annihilates.

Because the theory of natural selection is what turned the study of all living nature into an objective science, the historian of ideas interested in the strategy and structure of progress will, when he turns to biology, fix attention upon the background and consequences of evolutionary thought. He will place a different emphasis from that of the historian of technique or medicine. And if his compass is brief, he is likely to slight the deep nineteenth-century researches, the beautiful laboratory investigations, the admirable toughening of experimental rigor, to which are owing much knowledge and health. Perhaps it is unjust that the founders of evolutionary thought, Lamarck and Darwin, Cuvier and Lyell, Huxley and Mendel, should be so much more familiar to the general reader of history than those who in a technical view were (it may be) greater scientists: Xavier Bichat and François Magendie, Johannes Müller and Karl Ernst von Baer, Claude Bernard and Louis Pasteur, Theodor Schwann and Matthias Jakob Schleiden, Rudolf Virchow and Robert Koch. Thanks to their detailed work, the great specialties of modern biology build, confident of their foundations: histology and physiology, cytology and embryology, bacteriology and pathology. Yet no one of these fine subjects afforded biology a vantage point from which to reorient its whole posture. They invited, and indeed demanded, penetrating inquiry. They were less suited to stimulating broad ideas.

Neither will a focus for interpretation be found in the notorious, the singularly inconclusive debate between vitalism and mechanism, nor yet in the doubly quixotic conflict in which scientists and theologians charged one another’s windmills. Indeed, these issues have been confused too often, which is easier than to keep them distinct since both were very vague. As will appear, Lamarck’s theory of evolution was no refuge for theology. It was an application to taxonomy of Diderot’s organismic and metamorphic philosophy of nature. But even if the theological issues be kept distinct (as they seldom are), discussions of vitalism still contribute a measure of misunderstanding to the history of biology—a larger measure than to biology itself, which has got past it. To take the same example, Lamarck is often set over against mechanism as a vitalist. But the real question in criticizing Lamarck, and indeed the whole tradition of biological romanticism, is not whether an animal is more than a classical machine. Obviously it is. So too, since relativity, is the solar system, and this is a circumstance which makes physics neither more nor less humane, neither more nor less accessible to theology.

The serious question is what model of order biology will contemplate, and what instruments it will employ. Is it to suppose an order of things different from the order embraced by physics? Is it to seek out different laws of nature? And from this point of view, there is little to choose between mechanism and vitalism. Both propose the organism (whether or not it be only a machine) as the ultimate object of inquiry. Both address biology to a special kind or level of organization superior to what physicists find, and vaguer. And this organismic conception of order was that on which the great continental biologists in practice acted, grooved as they all were into specialties, constantly confronted by organisms in the laboratory, their attention fixed on cells, embryos, diseases, or whatever, rather than on the course of nature.

Only for limited investigations like Harvey’s of the circulation, had life scientists ever assumed a physical order, or quantified their information. The failure was critical. It had confined natural history and medicine to dependence on classification and dissection. Then once biology was named, it found its field of phenomena being fought over by champions of two quite incompatible conceptions of order. They were incompatible but equally unphysical, since one derived ultimately from the Stoic and the other from the Aristotelian traditions. On the one hand, the romantic nature philosophy of the Enlightenment had revived the ancient, the pagan sense of cosmic organism. Such was Goethe’s innate, indwelling order, the bodily expression of identity and personality. Individual animals participate in life process, in this sense, as organs do in the life of the single body. But (as will appear in the example of Lamarck) there is no correlation between this and a theological view of nature. On the contrary, the organismic is a self-sufficient order. It may be a moral order, but such morality will be naturalistic, never theistic. Diderot was an atheist, Goethe was no Christian.

In Christian culture, on the other hand, the little finger of Aristotle was still (despite the Enlightenment) thicker than the Stoic loins. The providential conception of divinely created order was far more deeply ingrained than romantic naturalism. Against this, indeed, whoever held the Christian view of nature was bound to set his face, not because of its physical arguments, but because of its moral pretensions. In Christianity, God is creator, teacher, and judge, not nature itself. And in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense of order, Christianized in the Middle Ages, which transmuted our culture, all nature is a divine artifact. Every effect in nature is a device for carrying out the purposes of the supreme artist, which may surpass our understanding as they certainly surpass our skill. Archdeacon William Paley, the dean of English natural theology, would often point out the superiority of divine to human craftsmanship. “How difficult it is,” he wrote, “to get a wig made even. Yet how seldom is the face awry!” But we worship the artist and not the work of art. Natural science, therefore, is only one of the servants of theology, the queen of the sciences. In serving, it becomes natural theology, which demonstrates the existence of the designer from the evidence for design, of the watchmaker from the watch. “Natural theology,” wrote Bacon, “is rightly also called Divine Philosophy. It is defined as that spark of knowledge of God which may be had by the light of nature and the consideration of created things; and thus can be fairly held to be divine in respect to its object, and natural in respect to its source of information.”

The universe, then, is one vast design, contrived of an infinite complex of subordinate expedients, all intended to work just as they do work with the ultimate purpose of promoting the welfare of created beings, and fulfilling the destiny of mankind. All this seems simple-minded enough nowadays in the twentieth century—now that worship of God has softened into devotion to man, so that religion in the mass becomes less and less distinguishable from social service, while the masses contrarily prefer to serve themselves with the fruits of science and technology. (For there, it may be, in the material plenty which science provides, and not in some intellectual defeat of theology, lies the real victory.) Perhaps it was simple-minded. But it was also Newton’s view of nature. It was, indeed, the view assumed by most scientists until well into the nineteenth century. At least this was so in Protestant countries, and most notably in Britain. There scientists sprang from the industrious middle classes, and there the injunction to individual interpretation of experience marched comfortably with Bacon’s supposition that to investigate the working of nature is to study the works of God. Nor did their findings yet embarrass a religion close to the Bible.

The fault in this structure of scientific support for religion lay deeper than the Biblical creation story. For God did not create the world in order to ignore it or (which amounts to the same thing) to withdraw behind the laws of nature. He governs it, and His government takes the form of Providence. “We know Him,” wrote Newton (to recall a passage already quoted in part),

only by His most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire Him for His perfections; but reverence and adore Him on account of His dominion: for we adore Him as His servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and everywhere, could produce no variety of things. All the diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing.

And in practice eighteenth-century natural theology tended to illustrate the governance of God from interruptions in the course of nature, from cataclysms like the punishment meted out in the Biblical Flood, for example. Newton himself supposed in passing that God must occasionally intervene in the motions of the planets to set right certain anomalies which he thought cumulative. Thus, theology put itself at a quite unnecessary disadvantage as compared to science, so that (as Whitehead once noticed) whenever scientists are forced by evidence to modify their theories, it seems a triumph for science, whereas when theologians find themselves under the same necessity, it is taken as a defeat for religion.

This continuing humiliation is a heavy price to exact for the fault of the first generations who had to live with modern science. With Newton, they fell into the unfortunate habit of arguing the existence of God from what science had discovered, and His governance from what it had not. Inevitably, therefore, any new territory embraced by science was withdrawn from the domain of Providence. And it was the descriptive sciences, geology and biology, which had to incur the strain and bear the odium. They were just then emerging from natural history to become historical in both the ancient descriptive sense and the modern temporal sense. Newtonian physics has nothing to say about the development of nature. For all of Newton, the universe might be the same today as on the day of its creation. Geology for its part was the first of the sciences to become historical in compass, and to touch in passing on the question of the Creator’s control of events. And living nature had always been the favorite repository whence illustrations might be drawn of “all the diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places.”

What argument could be more persuasive than that God’s infinite attention to detail should be exemplified in the adaptation of the forms of life to the lives they have to lead: that the butterfly should have been created to resemble the leaf, the tiger given its sabre tooth to seize the doe, and the giraffe endowed with its reach to browse off tree tops? How otherwise than by purposeful creation might the phenomena of adaptation be explained? Nothing is more striking to the student of organic nature. As a young man, Darwin accepted Paley’s reasoning: “The logic of … his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid … I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.” It was not, therefore, just a question of religious commitment, though that embittered the discussion and saddened many. Rather, the theological explanations of adaptation, employing the instrument of classification by form or species, were the last manifestations of Aristotelian science, that magnificent structure of thought which after two thousand years was still serving the sciences of organic nature in the nineteenth century—and still does serve, if only as a habit, in breaking which biologists grow strong and wise.

THE Natural History of Invertebrates in seven volumes by Jean Baptiste de Lamarck was published in Paris between 1815 and 1822. The Animal Kingdom Arranged in Conformity with its Organization in four volumes by Georges Cuvier was published in 1817, and was followed by a second systematized edition of Cuvier’s Researches on Fossil Bones in seven volumes from 1821 to 1824. To turn over the pages of these immense and lucid compilations is to traverse the painstaking detail in which natural history passed over from Aristotelian classifications to those of modern zoology. This new science links old nature with living in paleontology. It establishes relationships in space and time by the rigorous techniques of comparative anatomy instead of in the more obvious distinctions between four-leggedness or two, infant-bearing or egg-laying, slithering, swimming, or flying, and the like, which had typified animals since Aristotle. Botany had already made that transition in the work of Linnaeus. It is, indeed, possible to consider the work of Cuvier and Lamarck as an extension to zoology of Linnaean taxonomy, with its four levels of class, order, genus, and species. As in botany, refinements have been introduced into the ordering, along with immense accretions of detail. Contemporary species and very old ones in their thousands and their millions have fitted into place, or moved from here to there. But the categories that modern biology treats as the classes and orders of living nature are evident in principle, and often in definition, in Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Lamarck. The difference is that evolutionary biology has superimposed arrangements into phyla. It seeks pedigrees. It looks for lines of descent amongst the species which Linnaeus and Cuvier saw as discrete populations, fixed in form and capable only of creation or extinction, and which Lamarck saw as eddies in the one stream of life.

Cuvier and Lamarck were colleagues at the great Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Buffon’s old Jardin du Roi nationalized, rationalized, and splendidly supported by the Revolution in its enthusiasm for those sciences it took to be humane and democratic. Their works, indeed, were essentially publications of the arrangement they established among its splendid collections, some inherited from the old regime and others appropriated for the Republic by the revolutionary armies from the foremost natural history cabinets of Europe. Nor did they work alone. There were twelve chairs in this, the most lavishly endowed scientific institution in Europe. Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire and Brongniart addressed themselves to particular genera of mammals, Latreille to insects, and Lacépède (though superficially) to fish. There were demonstrators, laboratory assistants, and students. There were constant visitors from Italy, from Germany, and from America. Alexander von Humboldt nearly became a Parisian. Nevertheless, the contribution of the Jardin des Plantes (to give the Museum its popular name) to modern zoology and paleontology was polarized around the uncomfortable relationship of Cuvier and Lamarck. Their work was complementary. They could agree on details of actual taxonomy. The technique they employed Lamarck learned from Cuvier. But they could never agree on the structure of nature. They were like some pair of sixteenth-century astronomers, one Ptolemaic and the other Copernican, who differed not about practice, but only about fundamentals. They exemplify, indeed, the two great pre-Darwinian conceptions of biological order, Lamarck the romantic and metamorphic, and Cuvier the Aristotelian and providential.

Cuvier was Lamarck’s senior in authority but his junior in years. In 1827, it fell to Cuvier as Secretary of the Academy to compose the éloge in which that body pauses for a moment in making the history of science to reflect on the accomplishments of each deceased member. Cuvier was not generous in his tribute to Lamarck: “It is his observations on shells and polyps,… the sagacity with which he has circumscribed and characterized their genera,… the perseverance with which he compared and distinguished the species, fixed the synonymy, and gave detailed and clear descriptions,” by which Lamarck “had in the end raised to himself a monument as lasting as the objects on which it rests.” This was not the credit Lamarck wanted. He often exhorted his students to aspire beyond the detail and pedantry of taxonomy, way beyond it to a philosophy of nature. He offered himself to his students and his colleagues, indeed he thrust himself upon them, as natural philosopher to his generation.

Cuvier’s judgment was cruel (his colleagues required him to omit certain strictures from the printed tribute) and scientifically correct. It was Lamarck’s contributions to paleontology which entered into the developing structure of biology and helped pave the way for Darwin, exhibiting a concrete succession of organic forms. Lamarck’s evolutionary theory, on the other hand, became famous only after the Origin of Species, when certain of Darwin’s critics fell back upon it, either to discredit Darwin’s originality, or to substitute a humane alternative to natural selection, or for both these reasons mixed together.

Lamarck became a zoologist late in life, upon his appointment in 1793 to fill a chair in the reorganized Jardin des Plantes. Until then, he had been known to science only as an anti-Linnaean botanist. He first advanced his theory of organic evolution in 1800, when he was fifty-six years old. Few men develop a fundamentally new outlook at that age, and Lamarck’s evolutionary theory was, in fact, simply the transfer to his new concern with the animal kingdom of speculations with which, in succession to Buffon and Diderot, he had long been preoccupied in writings on chemistry, geology, and meteorology. And so embarrassing were Lamarck’s theoretical ventures, not as he resentfully imagined to the security of some vested orthodoxy, but simply for the light in which they placed their author, that he was never refuted. He was not even dignified by unjust treatment. The only conspiracy against him was one of silence. During all his lifetime, no scientific judgment was ever published on these writings. Officially they did not exist. “I know full well,” he once observed bitterly, “that very few will be interested in what I am going to propose, and that among those who do read this essay, the greater part will pretend to find in it only vague opinions, in no way founded in exact knowledge. They will say that: but they will not write it.” And one can hardly fail to admire his fidelity and sympathize with him as he toiled through the last twenty years of his life under the shadow of encroaching blindness, on what was expected of him, on what he did superlatively well, and on what he considered to be work of inferior dignity.

Nevertheless, it is as an evolutionist that Lamarck is famous—for who cares about an invertebrate paleontologist? Lamarck’s post-Darwinian notoriety may even seem to have prevailed over Cuvier’s judgment. But history has the last word over science only at the risk of getting it wrong. It will be well, therefore, to reconstitute Lamarck’s evolutionary philosophy in order to retrieve it from his reputation as an unappreciated precursor of Darwin, one who was right in principle but wrong about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. For Lamarck meant his work to establish, not simply the subordinate fact of transmutation, but a view of the world. His theory of evolution was the last serious attempt to make science out of the old instinct that the world is flux and process, and that science is to study neither the configurations of matter nor the categories of form, but the manifestations of that activity which is ontologically fundamental, as bodies in motion and species of being are not. And to put his thought in his own perspective, it will help, perhaps, to move from what is familiar in Lamarck to what is less so, and thus to trace the formation of his theory of evolution from its final application to taxonomy back to its origin in the general pattern of romantic resistance to physical science, and in his specific case, to the conception of chemistry as a physical science which Lavoisier shared with Priestley and all its founders.

Lamarck’s Zoological Philosophy of 1809 contains the full development of the evolutionary theory which he later exemplified in the Natural History of Invertebrates. Concise statement was never his own way. Nevertheless, it is possible to abstract a summary from the Zoological Philosophy. The book has three divisions. Part I treats of natural history, Part II of physiology, and Part III of psychology. In living nature, according to this philosophy, inheres a plastic force—indeed living nature is a plastic force—forever producing all varieties of animals from the most rudimentary to the most advanced by the progressive differentiation and perfection of their organization. If this action of organic nature were omnipotent, the sequence would be altogether regular, a perfect continuum of organic forms from protozoa to man. But the innate tendency to complication is not the only factor at work. Over against it, constraining it into certain channels of necessity which we mistakenly take for natural species, works the influence of the physical environment. The dead hand of inorganic nature causes discontinuities in what the organic drive toward perfection would alone achieve. These appear as gaps between the forms of life. Changes in the environment lead to changes in needs; changes in needs produce changes in behavior; changes in behavior become new habits which may lead to alterations in particular organs and ultimately in general organization. But the environment cannot be said to act directly on life. On the contrary, in Lamarck only life can act, for life and activity are ultimately one. Rather, the environment is a shifting set of circumstances and opportunities to which the organism responds creatively, not precisely as the expression of its will (although Lamarck’s admirers interpreted him in that fashion), but as an expression of its whole nature as a living thing. And it was rather as a consequence than as a statement of his view of nature that Lamarck laid down two corollaries which he described as laws: that of the development or decay of organs through use or disuse, and that of the inheritance of the characteristics acquired by organisms in reacting to the environment.

Seven years before, in 1802, Lamarck published Researches on the Organization of Living Bodies, a treatise based on the course he had been giving at the Jardin des Plantes. Here, too, the reader will find the main evolutionary principles. But the emphasis is different. The position is simply that species do not exist, and what interests Lamarck is rather the whole tableau of the animal series. We are to see it, not as the chain or ladder, but as the escalator of being. For nature is constantly creating life at the bottom. And the life fluids are ever at work differentiating organs and complicating and perfecting structures. And there is a perpetual circulation of organic matter up the moving staircase of existence, and of its lifeless residue spilling as chemical husks back down the other side, the inorganic side. The series in nature is indeed regular. But it resides, not in unreal species, but in “masses,” a conception of great attraction for Lamarck, which he defined as the principle systems of organization.

It was in 1800, however, in his opening lecture for the year, that Lamarck first asserted the mutability of animals. Here the emphasis takes still another form. The theses of 1802 appear, as do most of the evolutionary principles of 1809, but they do so in very summary statement and are introduced simply as subsidiary propositions illustrating the main contention. This is that natural history must begin with the fundamental distinction between living and non-living bodies, between organic and physical nature.

Now, not only is this the argument of Lamarck’s debut as a zoologist. It is also the argument of the final diatribe in the campaign he had been waging for over twenty years against the new chemistry—ever since the early papers of Priestley and Lavoisier. In Memoirs of Physics and Natural History of 1797, Lamarck refers in passing to the immutability of animal species. But here the central dynamical proposition is that all inorganic composites are residues of life processes, perpetually repairing the decay and disintegration which are the basic tendencies of physical nature. Returning for a moment to Zoological Philosophy, this is perfectly consistent with the ultimate theory of evolution, which describes the departures from regularity in the animal scale as consequences of the conflict between organic nature and the brute nature of the environment. This relationship between organic nature as order and physical nature as disorder, a situation both of opposition and dependence, is fundamental to Lamarck’s thought, which in this respect is almost dialectical.

Nor is the inconsistency on species other than trivial. In a short essay of 1802, he tells us how he came to alter his views on what he then saw as a detail. All he did between 1797 and 1800 was to assimilate the question of animal species—or rather their nonexistence—to that of species in general. For in Lamarck the word has not lost its broader connotations. He had long been impressed with the perpetual decay of the earth’s surface and had long shared the opinion that there are no permanent species among minerals. The only entities in inorganic nature are the “integral molecules” and the masses which form in the play of circumstance and attraction.

There is a striking parallel with the view which Lamarck came to hold of the living world. In both organic and inorganic nature nothing but process links the individual—the particular animal, the particular molecule—and the system of organization—mammalian quadruped, granitic structure—into which it is temporarily cast. This explains Lamarck’s pleasure in the concept of masses as the links in the double chain of systems along which materials move from mollusc to man, from limestone to granite. It was natural to think of the principle of mammal in the same fashion. The old intuition that minerals are molded by some plastic force, that they are bred in the earth, was still widespread.

In Paris, Lamarck complains, the chemists teach that the integral molecule of every compound is invariant, and consequently that it is as old as nature. It follows that species are constant among minerals. As for himself, he continues, he is convinced that the integral molecule of every compound can change in its nature, i.e. in the number and proportion of the principles which constitute it. To deny this is to deny the reality of the phenomena of chemistry, the fermentations, the dissolutions, the combustions, which leave the molecules in some different condition, as to form or density or other characteristics.

Moreover, the other two aspects of the Zoological Philosophy, the physiology and the psychology, these too will now appear as derivative from an archaic chemistry, both in manner and substance. This was a contemplative chemistry conducted far from laboratories. Lamarck lumped Priestley and Lavoisier together in the “pneumatic” school. His was rather the sympathetic chemistry of Venel and Diderot. Its cardinal principle was that only life can synthesize. Conversely the physiology of growth consists in retention during youth of what is needed from the materials which the organism passes through its system. Aging and death follow on the progressive hardening of the pliant organs by this life-long digestion of the environment. Later, Lamarck adapted his principle of an equilibrium balancing life against mass to provide evolution with a mechanism. It was analogous to erosion. (Lamarck hit upon the idea of evolution at the time he was writing his uniformitarian treatise on geology.) The property of life fluids is to wear away new channels, new reservoirs, new organs in the soft tissues, and thereby to differentiate structures and specialize functions. The individual organism silts up and dies, but leaves more highly complicated descendants.

Lamarck composed his first chemical treatise in 1776. It was his earliest scientific essay, and it contains an interesting note. In order to explain the origin and mechanism of the universe, he writes, we need to know three things: the cause of matter, of life, and of that activity everywhere manifest. In all his chemistry, Lamarck attached primary importance to the element of fire, and regarded oxygen as a perfectly gratuitous postulate. Not only has it never been seen, but combustion is explicable as the action of fire, which can be seen in the act of burning or shimmering over a tile roof in the sun of a summer day. For fire is the principle of activity in nature. It exists in many states, of which Lamarck undertook the taxonomy. Conflagration is fire in a state of violent expansion, penetrating a body and ripping it to shreds. Evaporation occurs when fire in a state of moderate expansion surrounds molecules of water, and bears them upwards, so many molecular balloons, to rejoin the clouds. Lamarck also aspired to found meteorology. Finally there is a natural state, to which fire strives to return, and this striving explains the phenomena of light and heat, of the atmosphere and the sun.

Nor did Lamarck ever abandon his commitment to fire. It provided him with a physical basis of feeling and of life itself, and this will make clear the mistake of those who have taken him for a vitalist. His dichotomy of organic and inorganic nature provides no escape into transcendentalism, and that has always been the door through which vitalists have slipped from science into mystery. Life is a purely physical phenomenon in Lamarck, and it is only because science has (quite rightly) left behind his conception of the physical that he has been systematically misunderstood, and assimilated to a theistic or vitalistic tradition which in fact he held in abhorrence. In his view spontaneous generation was no continuing miracle. Life was activated by the stirring of fluids. Lamarck hinted that this process is quickened by fire, and on the mechanism of sentience he was explicit. Its physical basis is the nervous fluid, the same substance as the electrical fluid, which itself is only a special state of fire. The pyrotic theory, therefore, embraces matter, life, and activity, and in that theory lay the common origin of the three aspects of the Zoological Philosophy—its psychology, its physiology, and its evolutionary view of species.

In no serious sense, therefore, is Lamarck’s theory of evolution to be taken as the scientific prelude to Darwin’s. Rather, as epilogue to an attempt to save the science of chemistry for the world of the organic continuum, it was one of the most explicit examples of the counter-offensive of romantic biology against the doom of physics. He escapes the consequences of the particulate views everywhere accepted by denying the molecule, the ultimate particle, that permanence required by the doctrine of chemical fixity. For Lamarck’s attack upon Lavoisier was of a piece with Goethe’s Farbenlehre, extending even to their mutual resentment of the claims of mathematics to speak as the language of science. His theory of evolution simply sucks the animal kingdom into the vortex of universal flux. Lamarck’s, therefore, is bound to remain an unenviable position in the history of science. He is a truly outstanding figure. But this ambiguity inevitably hangs about the merit of his achievements, and his career seems to oscillate between poles of futility and pathos. The futility is that of any victim of a plot, however fortunate the outcome. And the tacit agreement to ignore his theories did have the effect of turning him into a distinguished taxonomist, not perhaps against his will, but certainly against his inclination. The pathos is of one who achieved recognition for what he held in small esteem and never for what he prized.

No pathos spoiled the success of Cuvier, who went from strength to strength. It is characteristic that Lamarck should have ended among the humbler forms of life, classifying the “white-blooded” creatures, all vaguely lumped together by Linnaeus in the catch-all of “Vermes—worms”; while Cuvier, though he cut his scientific teeth on the molluscs, should have moved up the scale to appear as impresario of the dramatic and outré: the mastodons and pterodactyls, the fossil pachyderms and sabre-tooths. Cuvier was the better showman. But he was also the better scientist.

He was never altogether French, and the reorientation which he brought to his subject was only partly technique. Partly, too, it was perspective. Cuvier was born in Mont-béliard in the border region of the Jura, which is culturally and ethnically ambiguous as between France, Switzerland, and Germany. His language was French. His religion was Calvinist, full of the old Huguenot sense of personality and responsibility, still untouched in that country region by Unitarian inroads. His sovereign was the Duke of Württemberg, and he studied as a royal pensioner in the Caroline Academy of Stuttgart. There he fell under the influence of Kielmeyer, and of German Naturphilosophie, which encouraged his passion for nature study without taking possession of his scientific soul. Nature study was only his joy, however. He trained for the civil service of that small German state. While awaiting an appointment, he accepted a post as tutor to the son of a Protestant nobleman of Normandy, the Comte d’Héricy. Cuvier arrived in Caen in 1788 at the age of nineteen. Events soon rendered the administration of Rhineland duchies an irrelevant career, and he passed the Revolution in peaceful Norman seclusion, going only to the local natural history society. For he spent his time collecting and contrasting the animals of the beach, comparing them to fossil shells from certain quarries, dissecting cuttle fish, doing anatomies on the molluscs, and for his own satisfaction undertaking a systematization by anatomical criteria. “It was thus,” writes a friend and early biographer, an American lady whose style conveys the spell he cast, “from an obscure corner of Normandy, that that voice was first heard, which, in a comparatively short space of time, filled the whole of the civilized world with admiration,—which was to lay before mankind so many of the hidden wonders of creation,—which was to discover to us the relics of former ages, to change the entire face of natural history, to regulate and amass the treasures already acquired, and those made known during his life; and then to leave science on the threshold of a new epocha.”

His genius was discovered by a Parisian naturalist, the abbé Tessier, rusticating during the anticlericalism of the Terror. And in 1795, at the moment when the great French scientific institutions were being formed, Cuvier on the strength of two or three small publications, together with the impression made by his correspondence, was summoned to his post in Paris. His success was immediate. Confined hitherto to birds and molluscs, his interest expanded among the collections of the Museum. His first paper in Paris was on the Skeleton of an Immense Species of Quadruped, Unknown until the Present, and found in Paraguay. This was the megatherium, a giant sloth (which Thomas Jefferson had hopefully taken for a giant lion, in his determination to expose Buffon’s slander about the degenerative effect of the New World on the forms of life). Cuvier’s second paper was a Memoir on Living and Fossil Elephants. From the moment of his arrival, he addressed himself to the most interesting class, the mammals, and within that class to the largest members, not precisely assigning, but gradually relegating “lower” orders and classes to his colleagues (his elders, many of whom thus became his juniors), and to Lamarck the lowest. No year went by without its three or four major memoirs. He had no time to draw his course together into a systematic treatise. One of his students published it for him, working from his lecture notes, and Lessons of Comparative Anatomy appeared in 1800. The same year Cuvier was named to a chair at the Collège de France.

There was that in Cuvier’s talent which harmonized with the new dispensation in Napoleonic France. The Emperor, ordering the world after his own fashion, turned to the scientific community for counsel and assistance, and found there the sympathy denied him by political philosophers and men of letters. So it was Napoleon who profited from the training Cuvier had received to serve the Duke of Württemberg. He was appointed an inspector-general of education. He put in hand the creation of lycées, or higher schools, in the chief cities of the South of France. He became permanent secretary of the scientific division of the Institute, the reincarnation of the Academy. In 1809 and 1810 he organized the educational system of the Italian provinces. In 1811 Napoleon made him councillor to the Imperial University, the holding company, so to say, for all the faculties of France. Nor did these dignities disappear with the Restoration. A Protestant, he ruled for a time as chancellor over the Sorbonne. He was a member, too, of the Council of State, that grey eminence in committee which keeps to the shadows to preserve the profound continuity of French administration through all the superficial changes of ministry and regime. In 1819 Louis XVIII created him a baron; in 1832 Louis Philippe raised him to the dignity of peer of France; in 1833 he died, as the document which would have made him President of the Council of State awaited the king’s signature.

All this is a little less pleasing than the prospect of great talents recognized and skillfully employed ought to be. To say precisely why it jars is difficult. It is not that Cuvier fell victim to the temptation which seduces many scholars who have tasted power, dined on fame, and are never able to go from service back to work. Thus has many a creative scientist been turned, not unwillingly, into a statesman of science, a public figure, loudly lamenting errands that he secretly embraces as a shield from the fear of confronting his political self alone, there in the laboratory where he made his reputation. But it is not that. Cuvier never abandoned science for importance. Perhaps it is that Samuel Smiles might have found in him too willing an example of self-help. In Cuvier, the historian of science has to come to terms abruptly with the nineteenth century, where nothing edifies like success. The Protestant ethic pays off quickly now. The pleasure of the country boy in the seats of the mighty is ill concealed.

There is something overtly magisterial about the authority he won, and more than magisterial, prophetic. It carried over into his scientific style. The imperative mood seems to govern passages in which the genus Equus (horses, zebras, etc.) is assigned a whole class to itself in the order pachyderm, while the Indian elephant is divided from the African species, and both are related not, as commonly supposed, to the extinct mammoth, but (of all things) to living rodents, though distantly. One wonders why these strange facts seem familiar. One has the sense of having been here before. And then one recognizes why. The style is what echoes. This is how we were first told things about the world. It is as if the injunction “Let!” prefixed these pronouncements about the earth and its creatures. It is exposition by fiat. There is no room here for high-flown, man-made systems of theory. Cuvier is very severe about the spirit of system and the ungoverned imagination. As historian of nature, his relation to his subject is that of Moses to the people of Israel, or of Michelet to the French nation. He enters in, and keeps transgressors out. Its triumphs are his, its disasters epic. He turns the Sahara green and causes tropical forests to flourish in Siberia. He populates the earth with strange beings, pterodactyls, paleotheriums, anoplotheriums, and megatheriums; sweeps them aside in a great cataclysm (there is something here, too, of the Titan gods); summons to replace them mastodons, sabre-tooths, and great hyenas; overwhelms their penultimate successors in a deluge; and finally allows the present species to crawl from obscure corners and radiate across the continents. Not that Cuvier was so naïve as to reconcile science and the Bible. It is rather his manner than his detail which is Biblical, his scientific personality rather than his method or results which was formed by that book, according to which nature is to be taken as given, as provided in the very fullest sense. He tells of his state of mind confronted by the fossil finds unexpectedly turned up in the gypsum quarries of the Paris basin:

I was in the position of one who has been presented pellmell with the incomplete and mutilated debris of hundreds of skeletons belonging to twenty kinds of animals. It was required that every bone should go find the beast to which it belonged. A miniature resurrection was called for, and I did not hold at my disposal the omnipotent trumpet. But the immutable laws prescribed for living beings filled that office, and at the voice of comparative anatomy, every bone and every fragment leaped to take its place.

That voice of comparative anatomy was his. He worked in a fuller awareness of his own method than many scientists do, and it will, therefore, be best to let him explain it himself:

Fortunately, comparative anatomy possessed a principle which, fully developed, proved capable of making all the difficulties vanish. It is that of the correlation of forms in organic beings, by means of which every sort of being may be rigorously recognized by any fragment of any of its parts.

Every organic being forms an ensemble, a unique closed system, of which all the parts mutually correspond, and cooperate in any definitive act through reciprocal reactions. No one of these parts may change without the others changing also, and consequently each of them, taken separately, indicates and gives all the others.

Thus,… if the intestines of an animal are organized to digest only meat, and fresh meat at that, its jaws must be constructed to devour its prey; its claws to seize and tear; its teeth to divide and cut; the entire system of its organs of locomotion to pursue and catch; and its sense organs to perceive from afar; Nature must even have implanted in its brain the instinct for knowing how to hide and set traps for its victims. Such will be the general conditions of the carnivorous diet. Every animal destined to that diet must infallibly exhibit these characters, for its race could not have subsisted without them. But particular conditions exist subsidiary to the general ones, having to do with the size, species, or habitat of the prey, to which the animal is affected. And from each of these particular conditions result modifications of detail in the general forms. Thus, not only class, but order, genus, and even species are found expressed in the form of every part.

It is a little difficult, perhaps, to appreciate the power of the principle of correlation of parts if one insists on comparing it to so-called principles of physics like inertia, for example, or conservation of energy. These are rather axioms about nature, and taken as an axiom about the design of the animal economy, Cuvier’s principle is tendentious if not misleading. But if it be accepted rather as the account of a method than a statement about the laws of nature, then clearly it is positive and scientific. It permits prediction of the whole animal from a part (if it is the right part, that is, for the claims of being able to reconstruct an eagle from a pin-feather were a little enthusiastic).

In Cuvier’s positive work, the correlation of parts served him rather as a regulative principle than as a theory embracing some given set of phenomena. One is not to be misled by the emphasis on the wholeness of the animal. This works out innocuously enough in practice, for it is only the starting point of the analysis, and not its terminus. It is a complex fact rather than a question-begging explanation. The analysis itself fixes on each system of organs and ultimately on each particular organ. Dissection compares the structure of these parts, their variation, and (what is most significant) their relative importance to the situation in other animals. And once these subordinate facts are determined, they are related, not to the unity of life, much less of nature, but to objective circumstance: to an animal’s environment, its diet, its natural enemies, its destined victims. And if one may anticipate for a moment the Darwinian theory of natural selection, it will begin to appear why it was Cuvier and providentialism, rather than Lamarck and organic emanation, who set the stage for evolutionary biology. For already in Cuvier the creature’s organization is a function of its way of life. In a sense Darwin will only have to switch places between the dependent and independent variables in order to reduce the equation of life and circumstance to solvable terms.

In practice Cuvier usually found the most revealing indications in the structure of teeth and feet, parts which might be thought to have less to do with each other than most others. Their interdependence yielded him some of his most unexpected correlations:

Just as the equation of a curve entails all its properties, so the form of the tooth entails the form of the knuckle, and the shape of the shoulder-blade that of the claws. And reciprocally, just as any element of a curve may be taken as the basis of the general equation, so too the claw, the shoulder-blade, the knuckle, the femur, and all the other bones taken separately, give the tooth as well as each other—so that whoever has a rational command over the laws of the organic economy may reconstruct the whole animal from any one of them….

We see clearly, for example, that animals with hooves must be herbivorous, since they have no way of seizing a prey. We see further how, having no other use for forefeet than to support the body, they do not need so powerfully developed a shoulder….

Their herbivorous diet requires teeth with a flat crown for grinding grains and grasses. The crown must be rough, and to that end the enamelled segments alternate with bony. Since this type of crown requires horizontal motions for champing and macerating, the jawbone cannot be so tightly hinged as in carnivora. The joint must be flattened and correspond to a flattened facet of the temple bone. The chamber of the temple, having only a small muscle to house, will be neither wide, nor deep, etc., etc.

Biology must always be preoccupied with the adaptation of form to function, and what redeems the apparent teleology of Cuvier’s approach from the organismic fallacy is that, though he studies function, he orders by form. He accepts the animal as a given phenomenon. He approaches it as an engineering student might approach some machine to be analyzed. He teaches about it as a master-sergeant teaches some recruit the functioning and nomenclature of the rifle. The trainer disassembles the piece. He demonstrates the place and purpose of every part. He shows how each fits with all the others and conduces to the operation of the whole. He may compare one model to another, the manual bolt-operated to the semi-automatic gas-fired. But a good sergeant does not distract his charges by relating his lesson to the evolution of firearms, much less to the nature of war. Nor is the analysis turned into theology or philosophy or mysticism just because the rifle is provided by high authority, in whose name the teacher speaks.

Sometimes one hears biologists admit a little sheepishly that they still find themselves employing teleological considerations. No doubt this is true in part. No doubt it is in a limited sense necessary. Nor would they need feel guilty about it if they would distinguish between teleology as a philosophy of all nature, and the structural-functional analysis of particular organisms. The latter simply shows how the hoof serves the horse. This is their business to practise, as it was Cuvier’s, His teleology, on the other hand, which was essentially that of Aristotle, has indeed become obsolete as a philosophy of nature. In his own time, however, it may well have been helpful insofar as it led him to the study of each animal as an objective contrivance, and to the practice of intensive, detailed dissection. For this was Cuvier’s great positive strength. He was a deep-cutting anatomist rather than a natural philosopher. He was the first zoologist to do his taxonomy from fundamentals in the economy of each species. He never stopped with observation of external characters. Lamarck’s philosophy was not all that weakened him in the strife of their partnership. Neither did Lamarck practise dissection. He used the collections but not the laboratories of the Museum. No doubt it is impossible to experience vicariously what Cuvier gained from life-long habits of minute attention, from the prolonged, the self-imposed exercises which put him in absolute command of the facts of anatomy. He truly knew that of which he made comparison. And it is only just to recognize how he earned the authority he wielded.

Nevertheless, the authoritarian strain in Cuvier implied a certain scientific conservatism. He seldom used the term biology. Natural history remained his subject, and The Animal Kingdom opens with a discussion of the sciences. Science naturelle, or physique, has two branches, physique générale and physique particulière. The former, consisting of mechanics, dynamics, and chemistry, admits quantification and employs experiment. The latter, physique particulière, is synonymous with natural history. It studies the particular object and may not aspire to abstract theory. “In the former, phenomena are studied under controlled conditions, so that analysis may result in general laws. In the latter, phenomena occur under conditions which escape control, and the scientist must, therefore, strive only to distinguish amidst their complexity the effects of general laws already known.” This is because experiment is impossible in natural history. The naturalist has to accept his problem as a whole, and analyze it only in his mind. To experiment upon a living organism is to alter or destroy it, and in natural history comparison must take the place of experiments:

The differences among bodies are, so to say, experiments already set up by nature, which adds to or removes from each different parts, as we should wish to do in our laboratories, and shows us herself the results of these additions or removals.

Thus are established those laws which govern these relations, and which are employed like those which have been determined by the general sciences.

Now, this must not be interpreted as an assertion of vitalism, or an escape from science into mystery. It is the methods which differ according to the complexity of phenomena, and not the laws of nature according to whether one studies life or matter. What Cuvier is really expressing (for once) is a certain modesty, or even timidity, about natural history, which patiently discerns the operation in its realm of laws which the experimental and theoretical physicist has discovered in his. And Researches on Fossil Bones explains how one is to understand the uniformity of the laws of nature. Anatomical relations are constant, and

they must necessarily have a sufficient cause, but since we do not know what it is, observation must supply the default of theory. By this means we establish empirical laws, which become almost as certain as rational laws when they rest on observations often enough repeated. So it is today that whoever notices simply the footprint of a cloven hoof may conclude that the animal which passed that way chews its cud, and this conclusion is absolutely as certain as any in physics or moral philosophy. The spoor alone tells him who observes it the form of the teeth, the form of the jaws, the form of the vertebrae, and the form of all the bones of legs, thighs, shoulders, and pelvis of the animal which went by. It is surer than all the marks of Zadig.

In yet another respect, Cuvier’s conservatism had the virtue of its defects. His concentration on the particular, his despair of any instrument sharper than the taxonomic eye (or lens, for he was no Goethe to abjure the microscope), would have put a paralyzing limitation upon biological science, for all the surety of his anatomical comparisons. His was an attitude older than biological romanticism and idealism. Indeed, it was as old as Aristotle. Yet it was a fortunate survival. For it preserved against the idealists the proposition that life is not one but many. Cuvier could never discern that unity of plan which Goethe’s archetypal biology asserted, and which Lamarck’s emanationist evolutionary process strained to realize. Not that Cuvier adduced evidence for successive acts of creation. His science never aspired so high. But he could not in practice find points of anatomical comparison between the four main divisions among which he distributed the populations of zoology, the vertebrata, the mollusca, the articulata, and the radiata. Each seemed utterly independent from the others in point of organization, with nothing more in common than any of them had with plants. Nor was there any question of genealogical relationship among the classes, orders, genera, and species into which these divisions fell.

From the moment of his arrival in Paris, Cuvier had been fascinated by the fossil bones which had found their way into the collections of the Museum, spectacular relics picked up here and there from Paraguay to Siberia, which bespoke giants in the earth. As he perfected his techniques of comparative anatomy, he tended to find here their most interesting application. The science of paleontology, indeed, was created as the comparative anatomy of extinct species, building out from the kernel of some pelvis those vast, skeletal, plaster-of-Paris dinosaurs which still rear up so uneconomically in the two-story halls of natural history museums. Gradually the distribution of Cuvier’s interest shifted their way. By the time of his last work comparative anatomy had become the means rather than the end of his researches. As with other great books of the nineteenth century, the full title gives away the plot: Researches on Fossil Bones, Reestablishing the Character of many Animals, of which the Species have been destroyed in the Revolutions of the Earth. And a couplet from Delille on the title page sets the mood of these seven volumes. One is to imagine it declaimed, perhaps, in those tones of sepulchral soulfulness which the French reserve for historical or funereal recitative, to be heard nowadays in the sound-and-light spectacles illuminating monuments of the glory that was France:

Triomphante des eaux, du trépas et du temps;
La terre a cru revoir ses premiers habitans.

In this, his last appearance on the scientific stage, Cuvier was “a new kind of Antiquarian,” compiling the “Catalogue of Lost Beings.” Or possibly he was the hero of a cosmic detective story, with a tooth as the all revealing clue. As in a good detective story, the evidence was right under foot, requiring only to be looked at correctly. He need not go to Paraguay. He need not go beyond the Paris basin, where the gypsum quarries were yielding a treasure hitherto ignored of fossil carnivora, pachyderms, and reptiles, belonging to genera whose nearest living relatives prowl the wilds of Africa. To a Frenchman it was a profoundly moving thought that the Ile de France, the cradle of his civilization, should have been the habitat of these savage beasts. What was more, it was a profound convenience that he could tour nature back through time without ever leaving home. For it is thus that a Frenchman prefers to travel.

With Brongniart, Cuvier investigated the geological structure of the Paris basin. They published their Essay on the Mineralogical Geography of the Environs of Paris in 1811. It is one of the earliest systematic treatises of stratigraphy, in which successive formations of chalk, limestone, clay, and sand are distinguished lying layer over layer. Cuvier perfected and published the Essay as part of the Research on Fossil Bones. There he generalized the argument. Fossils seem to exhibit an order in their occurrence—the older the strata, the higher the proportion of extinct forms. But in Cuvier this is no order of morphological progression. Indeed, what interested him was less the succession in the animals he had studied all his life than the story of what had undone them, the panorama of cataclysm and catastrophe, and especially floods, which had suddenly overtaken the world, there in Siberia encasing a mastodon in a block of ice, here in Paris burying a crocodile in gypsum.

If there is any circumstance thoroughly established in geology, it is, that the crust of our globe has been subjected to a great and sudden revolution, the epoch of which cannot be dated much further back than five or six thousand years ago; that this revolution had buried all the countries which were before inhabited by men and by the other animals now best known … that the small number of individuals of men and other animals that escaped from the effects of that great revolution, have since propagated and spread over the lands then newly laid dry; and consequently, that the human race has only resumed a progressive state of improvement since that epoch, by forming established societies, raising monuments, collecting natural facts, and constructing systems of science and learning.

And Cuvier wrote for the Research on Fossil Bones a lengthy preface, a treatise in itself, frequently republished separately as Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe. For it was in studying these revolutions that science joins on to history, and the history of nature becomes the history of man. The traditions of all early peoples confirm quite independently the geological evidence for a natural disaster standing at the beginning of recorded experience. “These ideas have pursued, I might almost say tormented, me all the while I worked at my researches on fossil bones.” And here, thought Cuvier, in the physical history of man, lay the frontier of a new science, awaiting still its Newton, who should situate our knowledge of nature in time, as Newton had done in space.

IN THE CLOSING PASSAGE of his Discourse on the Revolutions of the Surface of the Globe, Cuvier reproached geologists with paying too little attention to these more recent events:

But how fine it would be to possess the chronological order of the organic productions of nature, even as we know that of the principal mineral substances. Organic science itself would profit. The developments of life, the succession of its forms, the precise determination of which had first appeared, the simultaneous birth of certain species, their gradual destruction—all this might probably teach us as much about the essence of the organism as all the experiments that we could try on living species. And mankind, to whom has been allotted only an instant on the earth, would have the glory of recreating the history of the thousands of centuries which preceded his existence, and the thousands of beings which have not been his contemporaries.

Geology is the subject which introduced a historical dimension into science: its own history, indeed, scarcely goes back beyond the nineteenth century. Even then, doubts were sometimes expressed about whether it could properly be a science at all. The geologist, like the historian, had to rely largely on interpreting relics of change. He could neither experiment nor quantify. Nor in the early stages might he even test the predictive value of his generalizations, as Cuvier, for example, could do. His conclusions were bound to remain matters of opinion in a way that those of the physicist, or even the anatomist, did not. And indeed, the science of geology represents a coming together of lore from the ancient practice of mineralogy with speculations about the origin of the earth, seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cosmogonies which have in them more of science fiction than of science. No doubt the historical bent taken by scholarship in the early nineteenth century stimulated a more sober approach to the question of how the world has come to be the place it is. But the essential technique for ordering the information about rock structures and topography into a science came from paleontology.

For lack of that, or any determinate technique, the controversies which attended the birth of the science were violent, immature, and inconclusive. The prevailing school at the turn of the century followed Abraham Gottlob Werner, professor of mineralogy in the ancient and famous mining school at Freiberg-im-Sachsen. He was one of those superb teachers whose magnetism turns students into disciples, and who is led by the necessity to lecture down the primrose path of systematization and organization by headings. It was the belief of the Wernerian or “Neptunist” school that all the rocks had been precipitated from primeval seas which had covered all the earth: chemically at first, when the slates and granites crystallized out; then mechanically, as the waters lowered and chalks and limestones settled; finally by silting as great torrents came and went and laid bare the mountains and the continents. Volcanic action occurred late and incidentally, activated by ignition of coal deposits, twisting the strata here and there out of the horizontal. In general, however, the earth was girdled in layers of rock as uniform as the leaves of an artichoke.

The picture was possible only at a time when geological information was mineralogical rather than structural. Even then it was barely possible, though its appeal is obvious. This “Neptunist” interpretation marched comfortably with a providential view of nature. It required no excessive run of time. There was enough water for any number of floods. Living species appear only after the primary rocks, and then in the order of Genesis: fish, mammals, man. These vast fluctuations must have wiped out hordes of individuals, and even whole species and genera, so that modern forms might well represent distinct creations.

The opposing school, the Vulcanists, offered no such advantage to tradition. “We find,” wrote James Hutton, “no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.” Hutton was a Scottish rationalist, a colleague and friend of Joseph Black and James Watt in the Edinburgh circle. He worked among the insoluble granites of Scotland, and was perhaps the first student of the earth who may properly be called a geologist. He published his Theory of the Earth in 1795. It enjoins upon the historian of the earth the full self-denial of science. Past events can be described only by inductive analogy to processes which we observe working in the present, and by the evidence of the rocks. There are two sorts in the crust of the earth, one of igneous and the other of aqueous origin. The primary igneous rocks (granite, porphyry, basalt, etc.) usually occur under the aqueous, except where formations are overthrust, or where molten dikes and plugs have intruded through the limestones. Weathering and erosion are constantly carrying a fine silt of sandstones, clays, and topsoils down the rivers and out to settle in the ocean bottoms. Some agency must have transformed, and must still transform, these loose deposits into the rocks around us. It cannot have been water. They are utterly insoluble. That agency must, therefore, have been heat. The intense heat of the earth’s heart, acting under enormous pressure, consolidates the rocks, and its expansive force uplifts the continents thus born in the bed of the sea.

This hypothesis accounts, as the Neptunist could not, for bent and tilted strata, and for the evidence of widespread volcanic activity. Particularly damaging to the Neptunists were the puys, the extinct volcanoes, of central France. But more valuable than Hutton’s igneous hypothesis was his assumption of the secular uniformity of nature. Nature does not grow old or lose its powers. His process was no past occurrence. Even now rocks are being consolidated at vast pressures under the bottom of the seas. Even now some lands are rising, and others being worn away. No perceptible change had taken place in all recorded history. But instead of summoning abnormal forces from the vasty deep, Hutton simply assumed the existence of all the time he needed. Nature has been swinging through cycles in a time as inconceivably old as the space is large through which the planets run their courses. Nor is geology anymore concerned with “questions as to the origin of things,” than physics with the reason for the law of gravity.

It is obvious that the Vulcanist position was the expression of the spirit of science and rationalism addressed to geology, while the Neptunist was the personal and sectarian spirit of a particular school, drawn not from the Enlightenment but from the crabbed tradition of a German mining school. Nevertheless, without some means of establishing a sequence among the rocks, the discussion need never have been fruitful. In one respect, the Neptunists helped. Their doctrine emphasized stratigraphy, succession rather than cyclic change. For it is not possible to order rocks chronologically according to their mineral or chemical composition. Fossils gave the key to classification and hence to system. It was picked up (such was the nascent state of the science) not by some one of the disputing geologists, but by an obscure English drainage engineer, William Smith, a consultant in the construction of canals, reclamation of fens, and the search for minerals. As early as 1791, he noticed that particular species of fossils occur in certain groups of strata, and in no others. He seized upon this fact as offering a means of identification of the main rock systems. He could, he wrote in 1799, easily trace the outcropping of each English stratum from the chalk of Dover in the South right across the island to the East Anglia Coast and down to the coal measures of Wales. Smith was not a writer or a scientist. Not till 1815 could his friends prevail on him to reduce his information to the surface of a map. The Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales (1815) shares honors with the Brongniart-Cuvier memoir on the Paris basin as the first stratigraphical analysis to use paleontological indices. But it appears that Smith knew nothing of Parisian paleontology, and indeed approached the subject from the opposite end. They moved from the study of fossils to that of geological structure, and he the other way about.

Like Werner, Smith was nearly incapable of literary composition, and the first connected account of his researches reached the public in 1813 in a book by a friend, the Reverend Joseph Townsend, entitled The Character of Moses Established for Veracity as an Historian, Recording Events from the Creation to the Deluge. For it fell out curiously. The merger of paleontology and stratigraphy, the former serving the latter in geology, cast the new science under the spell of Cuvier’s catastrophism rather than Hutton’s uniformitarianism. Personal circumstances reinforced this early association of theology and geology. Many of the first generation of structural geologists were Anglican clergymen, who as dons had to be in orders, or as parsons combined the bluff, outdoor spirit of the gentry with the Church’s vague sponsorship of genteel learning.

In this embryonic stage of geological science, the main categories of classification of rocks were primary, secondary or transition, and tertiary. Within these groups, it early became the practice to name the systems and periods either according to a traditional descriptive appellation (carboniferous, cretaceous), or in the case of the formations isolated in this, the “heroic age” of geology, after the region of the world where the system first displayed its development—for example, Devonian, Jurassic, Pennsylvanian, Permian. Thus as befits a science which developed out of history, the nomenclature of geology preserves a record of its own history, in contrast to chemistry which took its form from rationalism. The leadership of English investigators is commemorated in the number of formations which bear regional or traditional names from the British Isles. Smith himself, a man of practice but no education, simply adopted the local words for the characteristic rocks as he moved across England ticketing the more recent strata: Lias, Forest-Marble, Cornbrash, Coralrag, Portland Rock, London Clay, Purbeck marble. These, it turned out, came between the systems which Werner had described as Muschelkalk and Cretaceous, and the same series were soon found outcropping in the same order in other parts of Europe.

In the 1820’s, the Reverend William Daniel Conybeare, working with William Phillips, carried the English tertiary down from the Cretaceous to the Carboniferous. They distinguished between the Upper and Lower Cretaceous systems, the upper, middle and lower oolite, and established the divisions of each as well as of the carboniferous, which they brought to a close with the Old Red Sandstone. Below this all was tangle and confusion. The older formations were overturned and interspersed in far greater complexity. Many more accidents had happened to the original sequence. Their fossil population was much more sparse, much less studied, and ever less analogous to living species. By chance, moreover, they appear in regions which seem historically as well as geologically remote—in Wales and Cornwall, where Celtic vestiges survive from a different order of things. (In France, too, or rather in Brittany, the Arthurian mist clings about the geologically antique.) Ordering these systems, down through the era since known as the Paleozoic, was the major work of the 1820’s and 1830’s. The most important chapters were carried out by the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, professor of geology at Cambridge, and Sir Roderick Murchison, a Scottish gentleman turned geologist. At first they worked together, going off every summer with map, hammer, and specimen bag to tramp and clamber about the mountains of Wales or highlands of Scotland and the isles. Murchison eventually unravelled the upper systems in South Wales, which he called the Silurian after the tribes whom Caesar had found inhabiting that region. The work was if anything more difficult in North Wales, where Sedgwick was assisted one summer by a student, Charles Darwin. These systems, which he could establish with less clarity, he called the Cambrian. Unfortunately, Sedgwick and Murchison quarreled over the boundary between the two and closed their days in extreme old age after one of those interminable Victorian estrangements.

No doubt the amateur status of this generation of geologists helps account for the naïveté of the interpretation they put upon their work. They were forever rescuing geology from the imputation of being inimical to religion, but were never very explicit about who was doing the imputing. Perhaps it was their own Victorian consciences, torn between their desire to explain the history of the earth naturally and their fear that they would succeed. The Reverend William Buckland of Oxford was the most famous teacher and writer of the 1820’s. His first book was called Vindiciae Geologicae; or, the Connexion of Geology with Religion Explained (1820); and his second, which made his reputation, Reliquiae Diluvianae; or, Observations on the Organic Remains Contained in Caves, Fissures, and Diluvial Gravel, and on Other Geological Phenomena, Attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge, an idyll of the caves which appeared in 1823. It is essentially an application of Cuvier’s catastrophism to English fossil vertebrates, and there is good geology in it. Nor did this assimilation of the Biblical flood to geological catastrophism express simple fundamentalism. Accumulating evidence forced natural theology to interpret the Biblical events in a more and more allegorical fashion: the six days of creation became indefinite periods, and only the order of creation was retained; the six-thousand-year span of earth history lengthened out as far as needed in the pre-diluvial epoch, and it was the flood with which recent and recorded history began. In the 1830’s even the universal flood had to be resolved into (at best) an epoch of local catastrophes. Still, as Sedgwick often said, truth could not be inconsistent with itself. However fine and long drawn out the central thread of interpretation became, it must ultimately connect God’s word with His works. And finally, the notion of a divinity who must continually interfere with his creation to show himself a governing force depended upon the special creation and adaptation of forms of life, and most notably man, the reason for the whole creation. Geology, wrote Sedgwick in 1835,

like every other science when well interpreted, lends its aid to natural religion. It tells us, out of its own records, that man has been but a few years a dweller on the earth; for the traces of himself and of his works are confined to the last monuments of its history. Independently of every written testimony, we therefore believe that man, with all his powers and appetencies, his marvelous structure and his fitness for the world around him, was called into being within a few thousand years of the days in which we live—not by a transmutation of species, (a theory no better than a phrensied dream), but by a provident contriving power. And thus we at once remove a stumbling block, thrown in our way by those who would rid themselves of a prescient first cause, by trying to resolve all phenomena into a succession of constant material actions, ascending into an eternity of past time.

By laying hold on fossils, geology had come into control of its materials by the 1830’s. What it needed to become a science was to retrieve its soul from the grasp of theology, and to resume Hutton’s assumption of the historical as well as the physical uniformity of nature. That was the work of Sir Charles Lyell, whose Principles of Geology was perhaps the most famous and certainly the most influential book in the history of the science. In the quietest possible way, its purpose was polemical, “to sink the diluvialists,” Lyell wrote privately. It is a very large book, three volumes in the first edition, which appeared in 1831, 1832, and 1833. There is very little original geology in it. The main novelty was systematic—the distinctions of Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene in the Tertiary are his, to which he later added Pleistocene for the most recent period of glaciation and the appearance of man. But its power and influence derive from the measured and civilized account it gives of the whole state and content of a science. It is a model of what literate exposition may accomplish. The great, the insuperable obstacle which had impeded the development of geology into a true science was the unphilosophical supposition that a different order of things had formed the earth on which we live from that which now pertains.

Time was of the essence. The three skillful and lucid volumes of the Principles marshal the evidence that existing forces, given time enough, account for the observable state of man’s habitat. Since there must be no exceptions, the book came close to being a Summa Geologica. Lyell did not, of course, deny the reality of change, but he insisted that all change has been uniform, proceeding in cycles in time rather like the orbits in space through which the planets swing. Climate, for example, has varied here or there according to the shifting proportions of land and sea. Volume I describes geological dynamics. Familiar examples are adduced of the mode in which various agents behave—weathering, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, the influence of living organisms on the environment, and above all, the sculpturing by running water—the valley carved by the trickle. After each illustration, historical or contemporary, one is reminded how the cumulative effects of such forces (given time, always given time) had produced the phenomena which Cuvier and Buckland referred to cataclysms (to miracles, that is), and how geology, if it is to be science rather than theology, must reconcile the changes in the surface of the earth, not with the Bible, but “with the existing order of nature.”

In retrospect, it has often been observed that uniformitarianism in geology seems to cry out for evolutionism in biology. And certainly geology repaid its intellectual debt to biology almost immediately. That is to say, the seating of the chronology of earth history in paleontological indices, in the succession of fossil forms, gave biologists by way of return the sequence of species in geological time. It was for lack of this information that Lamarck (even if his theory had been free of other faults) had had to establish his order in a scale of increasing morphological complexity, instead of in a secular order of historic events. We know, moreover, that Darwin studied the Principles of Geology very closely. It did more to form his scientific outlook than any other book. “He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work,” Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species, “… which the future historian will recognize as having produced a revolution in natural science, and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.” As another suecessor once said of Lyell’s influence, “We find the data, and Lyell teaches us to comprehend the meaning of them.”

Nevertheless, Lyell set his face against the transmutation of species just as firmly as did Sedgwick, if in a better temper. Volume II of the Principles discusses the animal economy. The question was, “Whether species have a real and permanent existence in nature; or whether they are capable, as some naturalists pretend, of being indefinitely modified in the course of a long series of generations?” And Lyell gave his readers the first comprehensive précis of Lamarck’s views to appear in English, or for that matter in any language. It should be obvious why he was bound to come down on the side of fixity. Nor is his later influence on Darwin turned into a paradox thereby, for (as will appear) Lamarckism has nothing in common conceptually with Darwinism. Indeed, it would have been contrary to uniformitarian precepts to allow an alteration in species when none had ever been observed. We must rather suppose that life had originated in a number of “foci of creation,” spread here and there about the earth, and activated now and again in its history. For it was certain that some species had become extinct, and the globe repopulated from time to time, although Lyell admits to some surprise “that so astonishing a phenomenon can escape the observation of naturalists.”

Lyell, indeed, could scarcely feel altogether comfortable with the evidence for a progression of things in organic nature, and sensing his discomfort, his critics among the catastrophists pressed what they rashly took to be their advantage. Their objections make ironic reading. Here, for example, is a paragraph from the review by the Reverend William Whewell, a philosopher of science, in The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review and Ecclesiastical Record, which brought that respectable journal right to the brink of the ultimate catastrophe which engulfed providential science:

It is clear … that to give even a theoretical consistency to his system, it will be requisite that Mr. Lyell should supply us with some mode by which we may pass from a world filled with one kind of animal forms, to another, in which they are equally abundant, without perhaps one species in common. He must find some means of conducting us from the plesiosaurs and pterodactyls of the age of the lias, to the creatures which mark the oolites or the ironsand. He must show us how we may proceed from these, to the forms of those later times which geologists love to call by the sounding names of the paleotherian and mastodontean periods. To frame even a hypothesis which will, with any plausibility, supply this defect in his speculations, is a harder task than that which Mr. Lyell has now executed. We conceive it undeniable (and Mr. Lyell would probably agree with us,) that we see in the transition from an earth peopled by one set of animals, to the same earth swarming with entirely new forms of organic life, a distinct manifestation of creative power, transcending the known laws of nature: and, it appears to us, that geology has thus lighted a new lamp along the path of natural theology.

That was in 1831. One thinks of the warning of Sir Thomas Browne, some two centuries before, about those who “have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth.” Thomas Henry Huxley first read Darwin’s hypothesis of evolution by natural selection in 1858. The force of the concept simply leaped out at him, like the pattern from the pieces of this puzzle of biological adaptation. All he could say to himself was, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” The right answer, it came in that combination of unexpectedness and irresistibility which has often been the hallmark of a truly new concept in scientific history.