respecting the functions of food, which the German chemists subsequently developed, and which, as I have proved in the second chapter of this Introduction, may be applied to solve some great problems in the history of Man. The merit of this was so obviously due to France, that though the system now established was quickly adopted in other countries, it received the name of the French chemistry. 120 At the same time, the old nomenclature being full of old errors, a new one was required, and here again France took the initiative; since this great reformation was begun by four of her most eminent chemists, who flourished only a few years before the Revolution.121

While one division of the French thinkers was reducing to order the apparent irregularities of chemical phenomena, another division of them was performing precisely the same service for geology. The first step towards popularizing this noble study was taken by Buffon, who, in the middle of the eighteenth century, broached a geological theory, which, though not quite original, excited attention by its eloquence, and by the lofty speculations with which he connected it.122 This was followed by the more special but still important labours of Rouelle, Desmarest, Dolomieu, and Montlosier, who, in less than forty years, effected a complete revolution in the ideas of Frenchmen, by familiarizing them with the strange conception, that the surface of our planet, even where it appears perfectly stable, is constantly undergoing most extensive changes. It began to be under

119 According to Mr. Harcourt (Brit. Assoc. Report for 1839, p. 10), Cavendish has this merit, so far as England is concerned: "He, first of all his contemporaries, did justice to the rival theory recently proposed by Lavoisier."

129"La chimie française." Thomson's Hist. of Chemistry, vol. ii. pp. 101, 180. On the excitement caused by Lavoisier's views, see a letter which Jefferson wrote in Paris, in 1789, printed partly in Tucker's Life of Jefferson, vol. i. pp. 314, 315; and at length in Jefferson's Correspond. vol. ii. pp. 453-455.

121"The first attempt to form a systematic chemical nomenclature was made by Lavoisier, Berthollet, G. de Morveau, and Fourcroy, soon after the discovery of oxygen gas." Turner's Chemistry, vol. i. p. 127. Cuvier (Progrès des Sciences, vol. i. p. 39) and Robin et Verdeil (Chimie Anatomique, vol. i. pp. 602, 603) ascribe the chief merit to De Morveau. Thomson says (Hist. of Chemistry, vol. ii. p. 133); "this new nomenclature very soon made its way into every part of Europe, and became the common language of chemists, in spite of the prejudices entertained against it, and the opposition which it every where met with."

122 The famous central heat of Buffon is often supposed to have been taken from Leibnitz; but, though vaguely taught by the ancients, the real founder of the doctrine appears to have been Descartes. See Bordas Demoulin, Cartesianisme, Paris, 1843, vol. i. p. 312. There is an unsatisfactory note on this in Prichard's Physical Hist. vol. i. p. 100. Compare Experimental Hist. of Cold, tit. 17, in Boyle's Works, vol. ii. p. 308; Brewster's Life of Newton, vol. ii. p. 100. On the central heat of the Pythagoreans, see Tennemann, Gesch. der Philos. vol. i. p. 149; and as to the central fire mentioned in the so-called Oracles of Zoroaster, see Beausobre, Hist. de Manichée, vol. ii. p. 152. But the complete ignorance of the ancients respecting geology made these views nothing but guesses. Compare some sensible remarks in Matter's Hist. de l'Ecole d'Alexandrie, vol. ii. p. 282.

stood, that this perpetual flux takes place not only in those parts of nature which are obviously feeble and evanescent, but also in those which seem to possess every element of strength and permanence, such as the mountains of granite which wall the globe, and are the shell and encasement in which it is held.

As soon as the mind became habituated to this notion of universal change, the time was ripe for the appearance of some great thinker, who should generalize the scattered observations, and form them into a science, by connecting them with some other department of knowledge, of which the laws, or, at all events, the empirical uniformities, had been already ascertained.

It was at this point, and while the inquiries of geologists, notwithstanding their value, were still crude and unsettled, that the subject was taken up by Cuvier, one of the greatest naturalists Europe has ever produced. A few others there are who have surpassed him in depth; but in comprehensiveness it would be hard to find his superior; and the immense range of his studies gave him a peculiar advantage in surveying the operations and dependencies of the external world.123 This remarkable man is unquestionably the founder of geology as a science, since he is not only the first who saw the necessity of bringing to bear upon it the generalizations of comparative anatomy, but he is also the first who actually, executing this great idea, succeeded in co-ordinating the study of the strata of the earth with the study of the fossil animals found in them.124 Shortly before his researches were published, many valuable facts had indeed been collected respecting the separate strata; the primary formations being investigated by the Germans, the secondary ones by the English.125 But these observations, notwithstanding their merit, were isolated; and they lacked that vast conception which gave

123 This comprehensiveness of Cuvier is justly remarked by M. Flourens as the leading characteristic of his mind. Flourens, Hist. des Travaux de Cuvier, pp. 76, 142, 306: "ce qui caractérise partout M. Cuvier, c'est l'esprit vaste."

124 Hence he is called by Mr. Owen, "the founder of palæontological science." Owen on Fossil Mammalia, in Report of Brit. Assoc. for 1843, p. 208. It was in 1796 that there were thus "opened to him entirely new views of the theory of the earth." p. 209. See also Bakewell's Geology, p. 368; and Milne Edwards, Zoologie, part ii. p. 279. The importance of this step is becoming more evident every year; and it has been justly remarked, that without paleontology there would be, properly speaking, no geology. Balfour's Botany, 1849, p. 591. Sir R. Murchison (Siluria, 1854, p. 366) says, "it is essentially the study of organic remains which has led to the clear subdivision of the vast mass of older rocks, which were there formerly merged under the unmeaning term 'Grauwacke.'" In the same able work, p. 465, we are told that, "in surveying the whole series of formations, the practical geologist is fully impressed with the conviction that there has, at all periods, subsisted a very intimate connexion between the existence, or, at all events, the preservation of animals, and the media in which they have been fossilized." For an instance of this in the old red sandstone, see p. 329.

Whewell's Hist. of Sciences, vol. iii. p. 679; Lyell's Geol. p. 59. Indeed gneiss received its name from the Germans. Bakewell's Geol. p. 108.

unity and grandeur to the whole, by connecting inquiries concerning the inorganic changes of the surface of the globe with other inquiries concerning the organic changes of the animals the surface contained.

How completely this immense step is due to France, is evident not only from the part played by Cuvier, but also from the admitted fact, that to the French we owe our knowledge respecting tertiary strata, 126 in which the organic remains are most numerous, and the general analogy to our present state is most intimate." 127 Another circumstance may likewise be added, as pointing to the same conclusion. This is, that the first application of the principles of comparative anatomy to the study of fossil bones, was also the work of a Frenchman, the celebrated Daubenton. Hitherto these bones had been the object of stupid wonder; some saying that they were rained from heaven, others saying that they were the gigantic limbs of the ancient patriarchs, men who were believed to be tall because they were known to be old.128 Such idle conceits were for ever destroyed by Daubenton, in a Memoir he published in 1762;129 with which, however, we are not now concerned, except that it is evidence of the state of the French mind, and is worth noting as a precursor of the discoveries of Cuvier,

By this union of geology and anatomy, there was first introduced into the study of nature a clear conception of the magnificent doctrine of universal change; while at the same

126 Compare Conybeare's Report on Geology, p. 371 (Brit. Assoc. for 1832), with Bakewell's Geol. pp. 367, 368, 419, and Lyell's Geol. p. 59.

127 In the older half of the secondary rocks, mammals are hardly to be found, and they do not become common until the tertiary. Murchison's Siluria, pp. 466, 467; and Strickland on Ornithology, p. 210 (Brit. Assoc. for 1844). So too in the vegetable kingdom, many of the plants in the tertiary strata belong to genera still existing; but this is rarely the case with the secondary strata; while in the primary strata, even the families are different to those now found on the earth. Balfour's Botany, pp. 592, 593. Compare Wilson's additions to Jussieu's Botany, 1849, p. 746; and for further illustration of this remarkable law of the relation between advancing time and diminished similarity, a law suggesting the most curious speculations, see Hitchcock's Geology, p. 21; Lyell's Geology, p. 183; and Owen's Lectures on the Invertebrata, 1855, pp. 38, 576.

125 M. Geoffroy Saint Hilaire (Anomalies de l'Organisation, vol. i. pp. 121-127) has collected some evidence respecting the opinions formerly held on these subjects. Among other instances, he mentions a learned man named Henrion, an academician, and, I suppose, a theologian, who in 1718 published a work, in which "il assignait à Adam cent vingt-trois pieds neuf pouces ;" Noah being twenty feet shorter, and so on. The bones of elephants were sometimes taken for giants: see a pleasant circumstance in Cuvier, Hist. des Sciences, part ii. p. 43.

129 "Daubenton a le premier détruit toutes ces idées; il a le premier appliqué l'anatomie comparée à la détermination de ces os. .. Le mémoire où Daubenton

...

a tenté, pour la première fois, la solution de ce problème important est de 1762." Flourens, Travaux de Cuvier, pp. 36, 37. Agassiz (Report on Fossil Fishes, p. 82, Brit. Assoc. for 1842) claims this merit too exclusively for Cuvier, overlooking the earlier researches of Daubenton; and the same mistake is made in Hitchcock' Geol. p. 249, and in Bakewell's Geol. p. 384.

time there grew up by its side a conception equally steady of the regularity with which the changes are accomplished, and of the undeviating laws by which they are governed. Similar ideas had no doubt been occasionally held in preceding ages; but the great Frenchmen of the eighteenth century were the first who applied them to the entire structure of the globe, and who thus prepared the way for that still higher view for which their minds were not yet ripe,130 but to which in our own time the most advanced thinkers are rapidly rising. For it is now beginning to be understood, that since every addition to knowledge affords fresh proof of the regularity with which all the changes of nature are conducted, we are bound to believe that the same regularity existed long before our little planet assumed its present form, and long before man trod the surface of the earth. We have the most abundant evidence that the movements incessantly occurring in the material world have a character of uniformity; and this uniformity is so clearly marked, that in astronomy, the most perfect of all the sciences, we are able to predict events many years before they actually happen; nor can any one doubt, that if on other subjects our science were equally advanced, our predictions would be equally accurate. It is, therefore, clear, that the burden of proof lies not on those who assert the eternal regularity of nature, but rather on those who deny it; and who set up an imaginary period, to which they assign an imaginary catastrophe, during which they say new laws were introduced and a new order established. Such gratuitous assumptions, even if they eventually turn out to be true, are in the present state of knowledge unwarrantable, and ought to be rejected, as the last remains of those theological prejudices by which the march of every science has in its turn been hindered. These and all analogous notions work a double mischief. They are mischievous, because they cripple the human mind by imposing limits to its inquiries; and above all they are mischievous, because they weaken that vast conception of continuous and uninterrupted law, which few indeed are able firmly to seize, but on which the highest generalizations of future science must ultimately depend.

130 Even Cuvier held the doctrine of catastrophes; but, as Sir Charles Lyell says, (Principles of Geology, p. 60), his own discoveries supplied us with the means of overthrowing it, and of familiarizing us with the idea of continuity. Indeed, it was one of the fossil observations of Cuvier which first supplied the link between reptiles, fishes, and cetaceous mammals. See Owen on Fossil Reptiles, pp. 60, 198, Brit. Assoc. for 1841; and compare Carus's Comparative Anatomy, vol. i. p. 155. To this I may add, that Cuvier unconsciously prepared the way for disturbing the old dogma of fixity of species, though he himself clung to it to the last. See some observations, which are very remarkable, considering the period when they were written, in Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Moral, pp. 427, 428: conclusions drawn from Cuvier, which Cuvier would have himself rejected.

It is this deep conviction, that changing phenomena have unchanging laws, and that there are principles of order to which all apparent disorder may be referred,-it is this, which in the seventeenth century, guided in a limited field Bacon, Descartes, and Newton; which in the eighteenth century was applied to every part of the material universe; and which it is the business of the nineteenth century to extend to the history of the human intellect. This last department of inquiry we owe chiefly to Germany; for, with the single exception of Vico, no one even suspected the possibility of arriving at complete generalizations respecting the progress of man, until shortly before the French Revolution, when the great German thinkers began to cultivate this, the highest and most difficult of all studies. But the French themselves were too much occupied with physical science to pay attention to such matters;131 and speaking generally, we may say that, in the eighteenth century each of the three leading nations of Europe had a separate part to play. England diffused a love of freedom; France, a knowledge of physical science; while Germany, aided in some degree by Scotland, revived the study of metaphysics, and created the study of philosophic history. To this classification some exceptions may of course be made; but that these were the marked characteristics of the three countries, is certain. After the death of Locke in 1794, and that of Newton in 1727, there was in England a singular dearth of speculative thinkers; and this not because the ability was wanting, but because it was turned partly into practical pursuits, partly into political contests. I shall hereafter examine the causes of this peculiarity, and endeavour to ascertain the extent to which it has influenced the fortunes of the country. That the results were, on the whole, beneficial, I entertain no doubt; but they were unquestionably injurious to the progress of science, because they tended to divert it from all new truths, except those likely to

131 Neither Montesquieu nor Turgot appear to have believed in the possibility of generalizing the past, so as to predict the future; while as to Voltaire, the weakest point in his otherwise profound view of history, was his love of the old saying, that great events spring from little causes; a singular error for so comprehensive a mind, because it depended on confusing causes with conditions. That a man like Voltaire should have committed what now seems so gross a blunder, is a mortifying reflection for those who are able to appreciate his vast and penetrating genius, and it may teach the best of us a wholesome lesson. This fallacy was avoided by Montesquieu and Turgot; and the former writer, in particular, displayed such extraordinary ability, that there can be little doubt, that had he lived at a later period, and thus had the means of employing in their full extent the resources of political economy and physical science, he would have had the honour not only of laying the basis, but also of rearing the structure of the philosophy of the history of Man. As it was, he failed in conceiving what is the final object of every scientific inquiry, namely, the power of foretelling the future and after his death, in 1775, all the finest intellects in France, Voltaire alone excepted, concentrated their attention upon the study of patural phenomena.