The Few Paragraphs In Which Peron Expressed His Views Regarding The
Modification Of Species May Be Quoted.
It has to be remembered that they
were written in the early years of the nineteenth century, when ideas
On
this subject were in a state of uncertainty rather than of transition,
and more than half a century before Darwin gave an entirely new direction
to thought by publishing his great hypothesis. Cuvier at this time
believed in the fixity of species - constancy in the type with
modification in the form of individuals; but his opinions underwent some
amount of change in the latter part of his career. The point argued with
such gravity, and the conclusion which Peron stresses with the
impressiveness of italics, are not such as a naturalist nowadays would
think it worth while to elaborate, namely, that organisms having a
general structural similarity are modified by climate and environment. It
would not require a voyage to another hemisphere to convince a schoolboy
of that truth nowadays. But the paragraphs have a certain historical
value, for they put what was evidently an important idea to an
accomplished naturalist a century ago. They present us, in that aspect,
with an interesting bit of pre-Darwinian generalisation.
"Before natural history had acquired a strict and appropriate language of
its own," wrote Peron,* (* Voyage de Decouvertes, 1824 edition 3 243.)
"when its methods were defective and incomplete, travellers and
naturalists confused under one name, in imitation of each other, so to
speak, animals which were essentially different.
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