is being charged with
heresy and even with being an enemy of religion. His writings were
further so obscure in style as often to lead to misconception as to
their true meaning, while his great work--so far as the fragment which
was published goes--contained few records of original observations on
which his theory was based.

Dr Fitton has pointed out very striking coincidences between the
writings of Generelli and those of Hutton, and has suggested that the
latter may have derived his views from the eloquent Italian friar[10].
But for this suggestion, I think that there is no real foundation.
Darwin and Wallace, as we shall see later, were quite unconscious of
their having been forestalled in the theory of Natural Selection by Dr
Wells and Patrick Matthew; and Hutton, like his successor Lyell, in all
probability arrived, quite independently, and by different lines of
reasoning, at conclusions identical with those of Generelli and
Desmarest.

Although, as we shall see, Hutton failed to greatly influence the
scientific thought of his day, yet all will now agree with Lyell that
'Hutton laboured to give fixed principles to geology, as Newton had
succeeded in doing to astronomy[11]'; and with Zittel that '_Hutton's
Theory of the Earth_ is one of the masterpieces in the history of
geology[12].'

CHAPTER IV

THE TRIUMPH OF CATASTROPHISM OVER EVOLUTION

There is no fact in the history of science which is more certain than
that those great pioneers of Evolution in the Inorganic
world--Generelli, Desmarest and Hutton--utterly failed to recommend
their doctrines to general acceptance; and that, at the beginning of
last century, everything in the nature of evolutionary ideas was almost
universally discredited--alike by men of science and the world at large.

The causes of the neglect and opprobrium which befel all evolutionary
teachings are not difficult to discover. The old Greek philosophers saw
no more reason to doubt the possibility of creation by evolution, than
by direct mechanical means. But, on the revival of learning in Europe,
evolution was at once confronted by the cosmogonies of Jewish and
Arabian writers, which were incorporated in sacred books; and not only
were the ideas of the sudden making and destruction of the world and all
things in it regarded as revealed truth, but the periods of time
necessary for evolution could not be admitted by those who believed the
beginning of the world to have been rec