Among thinking men too the nascent science of geology was setting up a new criticism of "revelation"--this twenty years before the issue of the epoch-making works of Hutton. [913] In England the impulse seems to have come from the writings of the Abbé Langlet du Fresnoy, De Maillet, and Mirabaud, challenging the Biblical account of the antiquity of the earth. The new phase of "infidelity" was of course furiously denounced, one of the most angry and most absurd of its opponents being the poet Cowper. [914] Still rationalism persisted. Paley, writing in 1786, protests that "Infidelity is now served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile the imagination, in a fable, a tale, a novel, or a poem, in interspersed or broken hints, remote and oblique surmises, in books of travel, of philosophy, of natural history--in a word, in any form rather than that of a professed and regular disquisition." [915] The orthodox Dr. J. Ogilvie, in the introduction to his Inquiry into the Causes of the Infidelity and Skepticism of the Times (1783), begins: "That the opinions of the deists and skeptics have spread more universally during a part of the last century and in the present than at any former æra since the resurrection of letters, is a truth to which the friends and the enemies of religion will give their suffrage without hesitation." In short, until the general reversal of all progress which followed on the French Revolution, there had been no such change of opinion as Burke alleged. One of the most popular poets and writers of the day was the celebrated Erasmus Darwin, a deist, whose Zoonomia (1794) brought on him the charge of atheism, as it well might. However he might poetize about the Creator, Dr. Darwin in his verse and prose alike laid the foundations of the doctrines of the transmutation of species and the aqueous origin of simple forms of life which evolved into higher forms; though the idea of the descent of man from a simian species had been broached before him by Buffon and Helvétius in France, and Lords Kames and Monboddo in Scotland. The idea of a Natura naturans was indeed ancient; but it has been authoritatively said of Erasmus Darwin that "he was the first who proposed and consistently carried out a well-rounded theory with regard to the development of the living world--a merit which shines forth more brilliantly when we compare it with the vacillating and confused attempts of Buffon, Linnæus, and Goethe. It is the idea of a power working from within the organisms to improve their natural position" [916]--the idea which, developed by Lamarck, was modified by the great Darwin of the nineteenth century into the doctrine of natural selection.