allusions to evolution found in his writings. Otherwise, one is apt to
make serious errors.

He approached so close, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the
principles of the science of evolution that he may well be described
as the first forerunner of Darwin, although he did not go so far as to
formulate evolution as a scientific system, as Lamarck did.


CHAPTER 1.5. THE MODERN SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION.

We owe so much of the progress of scientific knowledge to Darwin's
Origin of Species that its influence is almost without parallel in the
history of science. The literature of Darwinism grows from day to day,
not only on the side of academic zoology and botany, the sciences
which were chiefly affected by Darwin's theory, but in a far wider
circle, so that we find Darwinism discussed in popular literature with
a vigour and zest that are given to no other scientific conception.
This remarkable success is due chiefly to two circumstances. In the
first place, all the sciences, and especially biology, have made
astounding progress in the last half-century, and have furnished a
very vast quantity of proofs of the theory of evolution. In striking
contrast to the failure of Lamarck and the older scientists to attract
attention to their effort to explain the origin of living things and
of man, we have this second and successful effort of Darwin, which was
able to gather to its support a large number of established facts.
Availing himself of the progress already made, he had very different
scientific proofs to allege than Lamarck, or St. Hilaire, or Goethe,
or Treviranus had had. But, in the second place, we must acknowledge
that Darwin had the special distinction of approaching the subject