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Even earlier the idea had come more or less vaguely to another great dreamer and worker of Germany, Immanuel Kant, and to several great Frenchmen, including De Maillet, Maupertuis, Robinet, and the famous naturalist Buffon a man who had the imagination of a poet, though his message was couched in most artistic prose.
But it is yet more deplorable that natural philosophers, of better information, adopted the Jesuit Needham’s ridiculous system, and joined it to that of Maillet, who asserted that the ocean had formed the Alps and the Pyrenees, and that men were originally porpoises, whose forked tails changed in the course of time into thighs and legs.
Robinet's speculations are rather behind, than in advance of, those of De Maillet; and though Linnæus may have played with the hypothesis of transmutation, it obtained no serious support until Lamarck adopted it, and advocated it with great ability in his "Philosophie Zoologique."
We have Cuvier and the mummies; M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties presented by hybridism and by Palaeontology; Darwinism a rifacciamento of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, &c. &c. How one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65 "Je laisse M. Darwin!"
We have Cuvier and the mummies; M. Roulin and the domesticated animals of America; the difficulties presented by hybridism and by Palaeontology; Darwinism a 'rifacciamento' of De Maillet and Lamarck; Darwinism a system without a commencement, and its author bound to believe in M. Pouchet, etc. etc. How one knows it all by heart, and with what relief one reads at p. 65 "Je laisse M. Darwin!"
But De Maillet was before his age, and as could hardly fail to happen to one who speculated on a zoological and botanical question before Linnaeus, and on a physiological problem before Haller, he fell into great errors here and there; and hence, perhaps, the general neglect of his work.
And when the stars were mirrored in the still canal and the grass was damp with the dew, they walked back to the house of Mother Maillet and little Rosemarie murmured her bit of a prayer and was tucked in bed. "I hope that some day I may go to Tadousac," said Farr to the girl, before he passed out of the good woman's house. "I would like to see the sunset, for you have praised it."
A contemporary of Newton and of Leibnitz, sharing therefore in the intellectual activity of the remarkable age which witnessed the birth of modern physical science, Benoît de Maillet spent a long life as a consular agent of the French Government in various Mediterranean ports.
The former was simply the creative hypothesis with the creator left out; the latter had already been propounded by De Maillet and Erasmus Darwin, among others; and, later, systematically expounded by Lamarck. Darwin's opinion of the scientific value of the "Zoonomia" has already been mentioned.
Maillet, in his "Description de l'Egypt," tells us of a pigeon despatched from Aleppo to Scanderoon, which, mistaking its way, was absent for three days, and in that time had made an excursion to the island of Ceylon; a circumstance then deduced from finding green cloves in the bird's stomach, and credited at Aleppo.
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