“In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the greatest naturalist of the age with their ecclesiastical opponents. Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution.”
Quote by Thomas Henry Huxley
Work
Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The
Browse quotes and source details for this work. more
Author
You May Also Like
Source: Doppelganger in My House
“There is no such thing as a man-eating shark, only shark-eating men exist.”
Source: Learning to Play With a Lion's Testicles: Unexpected Gifts From the Animals of Africa
Source: On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978
“It’ll never be too late to start to make use of the time you still have left”
Source: The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
Source: The First Confessor