of that history will enable us to understand why, if the "Origin of Species" appeared now, it would meet with a very different reception from that which greeted it in 1859.
One-and-twenty years ago, in spite of the work commenced by Hutton and continued with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalized by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand-new creation when the world returned to quiescence. A scheme of Nature which appeared to be modeled on the likeness of a succession of rubbers of whist, at the end of each of which the players upset the table and called for a new pack, did not seem to shock anybody.
I may be wrong, but I doubt if at the present time there is a single responsible representative of these opinions left. The progress of scientific geology has elevated the fundamental principle of uniformitarianism, that the explanation of the past is to be sought in the study of the present, into the position of an axiom; and the wild speculations of the catastrophists, to which we all listened with respect a quarter of a century ago, would hardly find a single patient hearer at the present day. No physical geologist now dreams of seeking outside the ranges of known natural causes for the explanation of anything that happened millions of years ago, any more than he would be guilty of the like absurdity in regard to current events.
The effect of this change of opinion upon biological speculation is obvious. For, if there have been no periodical general physical catastrophes, what brought about the assumed general extinctions and recreations of life which are the corresponding biological catastrophes? And if no such interruptions of the ordinary course of nature have taken place in the organic, any more than in the inorganic, world, what alternative is there to the admission of evolution?
The doctrine of evolution in biology is the necessary result of the logical application of the principles of uniformitarianism to the phenomena of life. Darwin is the natural successor of Hutton and Lyell, and the "Origin of Species" the natural sequence of the "Principles of Geology."
The fundamental doctrine of the "Origin of Species," as of all forms of the theory of evolution applied to biology, is "that the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings with which the world is peopled, have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent.[1]
- ↑ "Origin of Species," first edition, p. 457.
