zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles
Darwin. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations on the
right path, without any general movement on the part of scientific
and educated men. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in
his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the positions of the French
Lamarck, who in 1801 began developing the views he fully elaborated
in 1815, as to the descendance of all existing species from earlier
forms. [1907] As early as 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had begun to
suspect that all species are variants on a primordial form of life;
and at the same time (1794-95) Goethe in Germany had reached similar
convictions. [1908] That views thus reached almost simultaneously in
Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French Revolution,
should have to wait for two generations before even meeting the
full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of
the general reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828,
was officially overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England,
indeed, so late as 1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the
Nebular Hypothesis: "that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An
omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their position and
motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the
different functions they had to perform." [1909] And Murchison the
geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected
till his dying day (1871).