Granting all this, there still seems to lie back of all these theories a greater question connected with the major changes in paleometeorology. This is: What is it that forces the earth’s topography to change with varying intensity at irregularly rhythmic intervals?... Are we not forced to conclude that the earth’s shape changes periodically in response to gravitative forces that alter the body-form?”
Evolution.
Modern evolution, or the theory of life continuously descending from life with change, may be said to have had its first marked development in Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), a man of wealth and station, yet an industrious compiler, a brilliant writer, and a popularizer of science. He was not, however, a true scientific investigator, and his monument to fame is his Histoire Naturelle, in forty-four volumes, 1749–1804. A. S. Packard in his book on Lamarck, his Life and Work, 1901, concludes in regard to Buffon as follows:
“The impression left on the mind, after reading Buffon, is that even if he threw out these suggestions and then retracted them, from fear of annoyance or even persecution from the bigots of his time, he did not himself always take them seriously, but rather jotted them down as passing thoughts.... They appeared thirty-four years before Lamarck’s theory, and though not epoch-making, they are such as will render the name of Buffon memorable for all time.”
Chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829) may justly be regarded as the founder of the doctrine of modern evolution. Previous to 1794 he was a believer in the fixity of species, but by 1800 he stood definitely in favor of evolution. Locy in his Biology and its Makers, 1908, states his theories in the following simplified form:
“Variations of organs, according to Lamarck, arise in animals mainly through use and disuse, and new organs have their origin in a physiological need. A new need felt by the animal [due to new conditions in its life, or the environment] expresses itself on the organism, stimulating growth and adaptations in a particular direction.”
To Lamarck, “inheritance was a simple, direct transmission of those superficial changes that arise in organs within the lifetime of an individual owing to use and disuse.” This part of his theory has come to be known as “the inheritance of acquired characters.”
Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), a peer of France, was a decided believer in the fixity of species and in their creation through divine acts. In 1796 he began to see that among the fossils so plentiful about Paris many were of extinct forms, and later on that there was a succession of wholly extinct faunas. This at first puzzling phenomenon he finally came to explain by assuming that the earth had gone through a series of catastrophes, of which the Deluge was the most recent but possibly not the last. With each catastrophe all life was blotted out, and a new though improved set of organisms was created by divine acts. The Cuvierian theory of catastrophism was widely accepted during the first half of the nineteenth century, and in America Louis Agassiz was long its greatest exponent. It was this theory and the dominance of the brilliant Cuvier, not only in science but socially as well, that blotted out the far more correct views of the more philosophical Lamarck, who held that life throughout the ages had been continuous and that through individual effort and the inheritance of acquired characters had evolved the wonderful diversity of the present living world.
In 1830 there was a public debate at Paris between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the one holding to the views of the fixity of species and creation, the other that life is continuous and evolves into better adapted forms. Cuvier, a gifted speaker and the greatest debater zoology ever had, with an extraordinary memory that never failed him, defeated Saint-Hilaire in each day’s debate, although the latter was in the right.
A book that did a great deal to prepare the English-speaking people for the coming of evolution was “Vestiges of Creation,” published in 1844 by an unknown author. In Darwin’s opinion, “the work, from its powerful and brilliant style ... has done excellent service ... in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.” This book was recommended to the readers of the Journal (48, 395, 1845) with the editorial remark that “we cannot subscribe to all of the author’s views.”