“Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.” MindSciencePoetryTimeNaturalSpacePoetGeniusCivilizationDiscoveryMemoryHistorianFossilsTurmoilGeologyImmensityLord ByronFeebleMontmartreDiscovererCuvierGeorges CuvierTreatiseUralsBaron Georges CuvierGeorge ByronGeorge Gordon ByronGeorge Gordon NoelGeorge Gordon Noel Byron Book:The Wild Ass's Skin Source: The Wild Ass's Skin
“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.” ScienceEvolutionScience And ReligionOrthodoxyScience Vs ReligionGoetheJohann Wolfgang Von GoetheCuvierErasmus DarwinGeorges CuvierLamarckBenoit De MailletBenoît De MailletDe MailletJean Baptiste LamarckTreviranus Book:Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The Source: Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century, The