Dr Fitton has pointed out very striking coincidences between the writings of Generelli and those of Hutton, and has suggested that the latter may have derived his views from the eloquent Italian friar[10]. But for this suggestion, I think that there is no real foundation. Darwin and Wallace, as we shall see later, were quite unconscious of their having been forestalled in the theory of Natural Selection by Dr Wells and Patrick Matthew; and Hutton, like his successor Lyell, in all probability arrived, quite independently, and by different lines of reasoning, at conclusions identical with those of Generelli and Desmarest. Although, as we shall see, Hutton failed to greatly influence the scientific thought of his day, yet all will now agree with Lyell that 'Hutton laboured to give fixed principles to geology, as Newton had succeeded in doing to astronomy[11]'; and with Zittel that '_Hutton's Theory of the Earth_ is one of the masterpieces in the history of geology[12].' CHAPTER IV THE TRIUMPH OF CATASTROPHISM OVER EVOLUTION There is no fact in the history of science which is more certain than that those great pioneers of Evolution in the Inorganic world--Generelli, Desmarest and Hutton--utterly failed to recommend their doctrines to general acceptance; and that, at the beginning of last century, everything in the nature of evolutionary ideas was almost universally discredited--alike by men of science and the world at large. The causes of the neglect and opprobrium which befel all evolutionary teachings are not difficult to discover. The old Greek philosophers saw no more reason to doubt the possibility of creation by evolution, than by direct mechanical means. But, on the revival of learning in Europe, evolution was at once confronted by the cosmogonies of Jewish and Arabian writers, which were incorporated in sacred books; and not only were the ideas of the sudden making and destruction of the world and all things in it regarded as revealed truth, but the periods of time necessary for evolution could not be admitted by those who believed the beginning of the world to have been recent, and its end to be imminent. Thus 'Catastrophic' ideas came to be regarded as _orthodox_, and evolutionary ones as utterly irreligious and damnable.