Wallace succeeded in displacing the naïf conception of special creation by belief in the origin of species out of other species through a process of natural law.
In The Development Hypothesis (1852) he objects strongly to the incredibility of the special creation of the myriad forms of life, without, however, suggesting how development has been effected.
Poulton, in an admirable discussion of contemporary views regarding species (presidential address to the Entomological Society of London 1904), has shown that Darwin did not believe in the objective existence of species, not only because he was led to discard the hypothesis of special creation as the explanation of the polymorphism of life, but because in practice as a working systematist he could neither find for himself nor ascertain from other systematists any settled criteria by which a group of specimens could be elevated into a genus, accepted as a species, or regarded as a variety.
As may be supposed, theories of the origin of life apart from doctrines of special creation or of a primitive and slow spontaneous generation are mere fantastic speculations.
The vast authority of Cuvier was employed in support of the traditionally respectable hypotheses of special creation and of catastrophism; and the wild speculations of the Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe were held to be models of sound scientific thinking, while the really much more sober and philosophical hypotheses of the Hydrogeologie were scouted.
