Note 311 — Chapter VIII
Hugh J. C. Beavan translation
We shall be thanked for publishing here the following extract from a letter addressed to us by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the 3rd of June, 1860, and which relates to all these questions. “I said, two or three years ago, as I have learnt from M. Lartet (who remembered the expression which I had myself forgotten), that the present movement of science tends to substitute in geology the idea of the evolution of the globe for that of revolutions. M. Lartet has taken up this view, and adheres to it. It is of great importance to me, as regards my works on species, in which we must in this case substitute the notion of evolution for that of revolution; revolutions are here pretended creations, abruptly successive. It is time to have done with these views, which, instead of taking creation as having been once concluded, make at every instant the Deus ex machinâ intervene.”