good way beyond the limits of any cautious interpretation of the facts
then known.

[Sidenote: Darwin]

Although little acquainted with biological science, Whewell seems to
have taken particular pains with that part of his work which deals
with the history of geological and biological speculation; and several
chapters of his seventeenth and eighteenth books, which comprise the
history of physiology, of comparative anatomy and of the
palætiological sciences, vividly reproduce the controversies of the
early days of the Victorian epoch. But here, as in the case of the
doctrine of the conservation of energy, the historian of the inductive
sciences has no prophetic insight; not even a suspicion of that which
the near future was to bring forth. And those who still repeat the
once favorite objection that Darwin's 'Origin of Species' is nothing
but a new version of the 'Philosophie zoologique' will find that, so
late as 1844, Whewell had not the slightest suspicion of Darwin's main
theorem, even as a logical possibility. In fact, the publication of
that theorem by Darwin and Wallace, in 1859, took all the biological
world by surprise. Neither those who were inclined towards the
'progressive transmutation' or 'development' doctrine, as it was then
called, nor those who were opposed to it, had the slightest suspicion
that the tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as
a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one
could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was drawn to the
evidence; and the occurrence of great geological changes which also
was matter of fact; could be used as the only necessary postulates of
a theory of the evolution of plants and animals which, even if not at
once, competent to explain all the known facts of biological science,