the French Academy between Cuvier and St Hilaire. It is of the utmost
importance to science,' The rupture Goethe meant was about Evolution,
Cuvier contending that there were four species, and St Hilaire that
there was only one.

From 1830, when Darwin was an apparently unpromising lad of twenty-one,
until 1859, when he turned the world upside down by his Origin of
Species, there was a slump in Evolutionism. The first generation of its
enthusiasts was ageing and dying out; and their successors were being
taught from the Book of Genesis, just as Edward VI was (and Edward VII
too, for that matter). Nobody who knew the theory was adding anything to
it. This slump not only heightened the impression of entire novelty when
Darwin brought the subject to the front again: it probably prevented
him from realizing how much had been done before, even by his own
grandfather, to whom he was accused of being unjust. Besides, he was
not really carrying on the family business. He was an entirely original
worker; and he was on a new tack, as we shall see presently. And he
would not in any case have thought much, as a practical naturalist, of
the more or less mystical intellectual speculations of the Deists of
1790-1830. Scientific workers were very tired of Deism just then. They
had given up the riddle of the Great First Cause as insoluble, and were
calling themselves, accordingly, Agnostics. They had turned from the
inscrutable question of Why things existed, to the spade work of
discovering What was really occurring in the world and How it really
occurred.

With all his attention bent in this new direction, Darwin soon noticed
that a good deal was occurring in an entirely unmystical and even
unmeaning way of which the older speculative Deist-Evolutionists had
taken little or no account. Nowadays, when we are turning in weary