138 Harrison
substances that make up living things manifest “the law of the continuous
progression of its own workings.”^102
These theologically informed notions of biological progression were
to inspire the developmental schemes of Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet
(1720–1793), who was the fi rst individual to use the term “evolution”
in the context of natural history. In Considérations sur les corps organisés
(1762), Bonnet rehearses the idea that all the creatures that have ever
lived, and ever shall live, have existed in microscopic form, each encased
within its parent, from the time of the creation. The next phase of the
argument appeared in La Palingénésie philosophique (1770), where Bonnet
argues that this present world is but one phase of a cosmic succession of
worlds. The history of the cosmos is punctuated by geological catastro-
phes that bring each world to a close, and initiate the next. The biblical
Flood was the most recent such terrestrial event.^103 The world before the
Flood was inhabited by creatures quite different from our own, yet that
exist in the present world in a more advanced form. Each human soul is
encased in a number of germs—one for each recreation of the world. As
successive worlds die and are born again, human souls progress through
the various germs, in time attaining the highest form of perfection.^104
Animals too, are promoted through the revolutions of the world. Bonnet
imagines “a continual progress, more or less gradual, of all species towards
a higher perfection.” All creatures on the scale of being “will be continu-
ally changing in a constant and determined order.”^105 This was natural
history on a grand cosmic scale, at its most theoretically and metaphysi-
cally sophisticated.
The enterprises of Buffon and Bonnet are somewhat removed from the
ideals of Bacon, insofar as they attempt to explain the diverse phenomena
of nature according to a single principle. These later writers strived to
bring lawful explanation into natural history and thus make it more like
natural philosophy. The introduction of these grand organizational prin-
ciples into natural history was among a number of factors that enhanced
its public stature. “The science of natural history,” wrote one observer
in 1765, “is more cultivated than it ever has been... at present natural
history occupies the public more than experimental physics or any other
science.”^106 Another consideration in the changing status of natural his-
tory was the popularity of natural theology. As we have seen, less dynamic
accounts of natural history than those of Buffon and Bonnet could also
be organized around a single principle—that of design. Many eighteenth-
and nineteenth- century descriptive natural histories are really natural
theologies governed by the principle of divine forethought. Peter Roget
(1779–1869), physiologist, secretary of the Royal Society, and creator of