d Reinhold Treviranus, a German
naturalist physician, professor of mathematics in the lyceum at Bremen.

It was an interesting coincidence that Treviranus should have published
the first volume of his Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur,
in which his views on the transmutation of species were expounded, in
1802, the same twelvemonth in which Lamarck's first exposition of the
same doctrine appeared in his Recherches sur l'Organisation des Corps
Vivants. It is singular, too, that Lamarck, in his Hydrogelogie of
the same date, should independently have suggested "biology" as an
appropriate word to express the general science of living things. It is
significant of the tendency of thought of the time that the need of
such a unifying word should have presented itself simultaneously to
independent thinkers in different countries.

That same memorable year, Lorenz Oken, another philosophical naturalist,
professor in the University of Zurich, published the preliminary
outlines of his Philosophie der Natur, which, as developed through
later publications, outlined a theory of spontaneous generation and of
evolution of species. Thus it appears that this idea was germinating
in the minds of several of the ablest men of the time during the
first decade of our century. But the singular result of their various
explications was to give sudden check to that undercurrent of thought
which for some time had been setting towards this conception. As soon as
it was made clear whither the concession that animals may be changed
by their environment must logically trend, the recoil from the idea
was instantaneous and fervid. Then for a generation Cuvier was almost
absolutely dominant, and his verdict was generally considered final.

There was, indeed, one naturalist of authority in France who had the
hardihood to stand out against Cuvier and his school, and who was in a
position to gain a hearing, though by no means to divide the following.
This was Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the famous author of the
Philosophie Anatomique, and for many years the colleague of Lamarck
at the Jardin des Plantes. Like Goethe, Geoffroy was pre-eminently an
anatomist, and, like the great German, he had early been impressed with
the resemblances between the analogous organs of different classes of
beings. He conceived the idea that an absolute unity of type prevails
throughout organic nature as regards each set of organs. Out of this
idea grew his grad