At the end of the book he sums up his views in the following sentences: 'The world has been evolved, not created; it has arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than suddenly come into being at an almighty word.' 'What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect! the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens entium! For if we could compare the Infinite it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves.' In these words he sets forth his position in regard to religion, and does so in precisely the same terms as we may use to-day when we say: 'All that happens in the world depends on the forces that prevail in it, and results according to law; but where these forces and their substratum, Matter, come from, we know not, and here we have room for faith.' I have not been able to discover whether the _Zoonomia_, with its revolutionary ideas, attracted much attention at the time when it appeared, but it would seem not. In any case, it was afterwards so absolutely forgotten, that in an otherwise very complete _History of Zoology_, published in 1872 by Victor Carus, it was not even mentioned. About a year after the appearance of _Zoonomia_, Isidore Geoffrey St.-Hilaire in Paris expounded the view that what are called species are really only 'degenerations,' deteriorations from one and the same type, which shows that he too had begun to have doubts as to the fixity of species. Yet it was not till the third decade of the nineteenth century that he clearly and definitely took up the position of the doctrine of transformation, and to this we shall have to return later on. But as early as the first decade of the century this position was taken up by two noteworthy naturalists, a German and a Frenchman, Treviranus and Lamarck.