are concerned, my analysis of Lyell's second volume has shown how good a witness 
of his time he was.
 

Historians have too readily assumed, under the influence of Cuvier and Marie 
Jean Pierre Flourens, that Lamarck's theories had no followers, provided no 
inspiration, and were considered by the overall majority of French naturalists 
as disreputable and unscientific. The debate between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint 
Hilaire has therefore been regarded as an attempt by the victorious Cuvier to 
silence his opponent. I would like to suggest that it was in fact Cuvier who was 
under some pressure during the 1820s (70). Cuvier's policy of remaining silent, 
whenever possible, on the various transformist theories currently advanced, and 
on the continuous ascendancy of the French brand of transcendental anatomy, had 
to be changed in the late 1820s, when the idea of a unity of plan pervading the 
whole of the animate creation found many and authoritative supporters, and was 
looked on with positive interest even by naturalists who, like Serres, shared 
many of Cuvier's ideas on the methods and goals of natural history. Cuvier 
decided then to take the first good occasion to launch his counter attack.
 

Lyell showed in his Principles that he was aware that it was possible to graft 
some of the tenets of the transcendental anatomists on to some modified form of 
transformism : indeed, Geoffroy was authoritative enough to make the possibility 
of a large-scale revival of a new form of transformism very possible. Serres 
himself, as we have seen above, was not unaware of the possible transformist 
application of his own theories. Furthermore, if Georges Cuvier avoided 
commenting on the theories of his adversaries as much as possible, his younger 
brother Fréderic did express much concern for the materialistic implications of 
a theory of development of mental faculties, which were seen as linked to the 
process of complication of organization in the nervous system.
 

For several reasons, Lyell preferred to concentrate on the work of Lamarck 
himself. Obviously, Lamarck was the most famous representative of transformism, 
but at a more sophisticated level of cultural polemic, Lyell probably wanted to 
emphasize that any coherent form of transformism was to be considered as a 
modification of Lamarckism, and therefore as a theory based on imagination. 
Lyell also believed, together with his friend Fleming, that a revival of 
transformism, or of some form of Lamarckism, was a possibility not limited only 
to France. He saw signs of the diffusion of transformism in England itself, 
where it could even form an unholy alliance with prevailing progressionist and 
directionalist interpretations of the history of life on earth. If, therefore, 
the biological debates in France in the late 1830s saw a retreat of transformist 
theories, their defeat had not been beyond dispute in the 1820s and early 
1830s.
 

I hope I have been able to point out the necessity of taking into systematic 
account channels of diffusion of ideas other than major 

(70) See E. S. Russell, op. cit. (49), p. 63 ; but cf. p. 128.