Abstract
ONE of the most interesting evidences of the differing results of municipal organization in foreign countries, as compared with those resulting from such organization in our own, is the news that the Municipal Council of Paris intends to found (in connection with the Sorbonne, or the Jardin des Plantes, or the Collège de France, we do not know which) a Chair of Philosophical Zoology, with a special view to the propagation of the doctrine of evolution as elaborated by Darwin. It appears that the official naturalists in France—those holding the leading professorships and museum appointments—have not hitherto been very friendly to Darwinian doctrine. The Municipal Council of Paris has recognized the fact that there is an undesirable hostility to Darwin's views amongst the official group, and actually proposes to remedy the evil results of this hostility by establishing a new Chair, destined to give fair play and a full hearing to the new philosophy. It is as though the Corporation of London should propose to build and endow a laboratory of physiological experiment or of bacteriology. The imagination recoils before the task of picturing Mr. Alderman Greenfat expounding to his colleagues the importance to the community of scientific research, and carrying with him a large majority in favour of a scientific enterprise hitherto neglected and even penalized by middle-class authority.
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L., E. The Chair of Darwinism in Paris . Nature 37, 256 (1888). https://doi.org/10.1038/037256a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/037256a0