"[62]
But all this triumph of the Chaldeo-Babylonian creation legends
which the Church had inherited availed but little.
For about the end of the eighteenth century fruitful suggestions
and even clear presentations of this or that part of a large
evolutionary doctrine came thick and fast, and from the most
divergent quarters. Especially remarkable were those which came
from Erasmus Darwin in England, from Maupertuis in France, from
Oken in Switzerland, and from Herder, and, most brilliantly of all,
from Goethe in Germany.
Two men among these thinkers must be especially
mentioned--Treviranus in Germany and Lamarck in France; each
independently of the other drew the world more completely than ever
before in this direction.
From Treviranus came, in 1802, his work on biology, and in this he
gave forth the idea that from forms of life originally simple had
arisen all higher organizations by gradual development; that every
living feature has a capacity for receiving modifications of its
structure from external influences; and that no species had become
really extinct, but that each had passed into some other species.
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