as an hypothesis of what might have been the mode of origin of the
world, while professing to accept the ecclesiastical scheme of
creation, as an account of that which actually was its manner of
coming into existence. In the eighteenth century, Kant put forth a
remarkable speculation as to the origin of the solar system, closely
similar to that subsequently adopted by Laplace and destined to become
famous under the title of the 'nebular hypothesis.'

The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian
geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the
speculations of Leibnitz in the 'Protogaea' and of Buffon in his
'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of Hutton, in
the latter part of the eighteenth century; all these tended to show
that the fabric of the earth itself implied the continuance of
processes of natural causation for a period of time as great, in
relation to human history, as the distances of the heavenly bodies
from us are, in relation to terrestrial standards of measurement. The
abyss of time began to loom as large as the abyss of space. And this
revelation to sight and touch, of a link here and a link there of a
practically infinite chain of natural causes and effects, prepared the
way, as perhaps nothing else has done, for the modern form of the
ancient theory of evolution.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first
serious attempt to apply the doctrine to the living world. In the
latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Treviranus, and Lamarck
took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The
question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the
fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier
and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological