“Je laisse M. Darwin!”

But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers’ attention to his wonderful tenth chapter, “De la Preexistence des Germes et de l’Epigenese,” which opens thus:—­

“Spontaneous generation is only a chimaera.  This point established, two hypotheses remain:  that of pre-existence and that of epigenesis.  The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as the other.” (P. 163.)

“The doctrine of epigenesis is derived from Harvey:  following by ocular inspection the development of the new being in the Windsor does, he saw each part appear successively, and taking the moment of appearance for the moment of formation he imagined epigenesis.” (P. 165.)

On the contrary, says M. Flourens (p. 167),

“The new being is formed at a stroke (tout d’un coup), as a whole, instantaneously; it is not formed part by part, and at different times.  It is formed at once; it is formed at the single individual moment at which the conjunction of the male and female elements takes place.”

It will be observed that M. Flourens uses language which cannot be mistaken.  For him, the labours of Von Baer, of Rathke, of Coste, and their contemporaries and successors in Germany, France, and England, are non-existent; and, as Darwin “imagina” natural selection, so Harvey “imagina” that doctrine which gives him an even greater claim to the veneration of posterity than his better known discovery of the circulation of the blood.

Language such as that we have quoted is, in fact, so preposterous, so utterly incompatible with anything but absolute ignorance of some of the best established facts, that we should have passed it over in silence had it not appeared to afford some clue to M. Flourens’ unhesitating, a priori, repudiation of all forms of the doctrine of the progressive modification of living beings.  He whose mind remains uninfluenced by an acquaintance with the phaenomena of development, must indeed lack one of the chief motives towards the endeavour to trace a genetic relation between the different existing forms of life.  Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate the site of a Roman camp, as aught but part and parcel of the primaeval hill-side.  So M. Flourens, who believes that embryos are formed “tout d’un coup,” naturally finds no difficulty in conceiving that species came into existence in the same way.

FOOTNOTES: 

[65] “Die Radiolarien:  eine Monographie,” p. 231.

[66] Space will not allow us to give Professor Koelliker’s arguments in detail; our readers will find a full and accurate version of them in the Reader for August 13th and 20th, 1864.