Lastly, the historians see the emergence, as though before their very eyes, of an opposition between those who believe in the immobility of nature in the manner of Tournefort, and above all Linnaeus and those who, with Bonnet, Beno de Maillet, and Diderot, already have a presentiment of life's creative powers, of its inexhaustible power of transformation, of its plasticity, and of that movement by means of which it envelops all its productions, ourselves included, in a time of which no one is master.