Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology.—His Natural History of the Earth’s Development.—Origin of the Greatest Effects through the Multiplication of the Smallest Causes.—Unlimited Extent of Geological Periods.—Lyell’s Refutation of Cuvier’s History of Creation.—The Establishment of the Uninterrupted Connection of Historical Development by Lyell and Darwin.—Biographical Notice of Charles Darwin.—His Scientific Works.—His Theory of Coral Reefs.—Development of the Theory of Selection.—A Letter of Darwin’s.—The Contemporaneous Appearance of Darwin’s and Alfred Wallace’s Theory of Selection.—Darwin’s Study of Domestic Animals and Cultivated Plants.—Andreas Wagner’s notions as to the Special Creation of Cultivated Organisms for the good of Man.—The Tree of Knowledge in Paradise.—Comparison between Wild and Cultivated Organisms.—Darwin’s Study of Domestic Pigeons.—Importance of Pigeon Breeding.—Common Descent of all Races of Pigeons. During the thirty years, from 1830 until 1859, when Darwin’s work appeared, the ideas of creation introduced by Cuvier remained predominant in the sciences of organic nature. People rested satisfied with the unscientific assumption, that in the course of the earth’s history, a series of inexplicable revolutions had periodically annihilated the whole world of animals and plants, and that at the end of each revolution, and the beginning of a new period, a new enlarged, and improved edition of the organic population had appeared. Although the number of these editions of creation was altogether problematical, and in truth could not be fixed at all, and although the numerous advances which, during this time, were made in all the departments of zoology and botany demonstrated more and more that Cuvier’s hypothesis was unfounded and untenable, and that Lamarck’s natural theory of development was nearer the truth, yet the former maintained its authority almost universally among biologists. This must, above all, be ascribed to the veneration which Cuvier had acquired, and strikingly illustrates how injurious to the progress of humanity a faith in any definite authority may become. Authority, as Goethe once admirably said, perpetuates the individual, which as an individual should pass away, rejects and allows to pass that which should be held fast, and is the main obstacle to the advance of humanity.