230 LAMARCK AM) DARWIN 



attitude to Darwinism as he did to the evolution theories in 

 vogue in his youth. 



Although in the twenty or thirty years before the publica- 

 tion of the Origin of Species (1859) no evolution-theory of 

 any importance was published, and although the great 

 majority of biologists believed in the constancy of species, 

 there were not wanting some who, like von Baer, had an 

 open mind on the subject, or even believed in the occurrence 

 of evolutionary processes of small scope. Isidore Geoffrey 

 St Ililaire, the son of the great Etienne Geoffrey St 

 Hilaire, seems to have held that species might be formed 

 from varieties. The law which L. Agassiz thought he could 

 establish, 1 of the parallelism between pala^ontological 

 succession, systematic rank, and embryological development, 

 tended to help the progress of evolutionary ideas. J. V. Carus, 

 who afterwards became a supporter of Darwin, seems already, 

 in 1853, to have inferred from Agassiz's law the probability of 

 evolution. 2 



But no evolution theory was taken very seriously before 

 1859, when the Origin of Species was published. 



Like Lamarck, Charles Darwin was, neither by inclination 

 nor by training, a morphologist. In his youth he was a 

 collector, a sportsman and a field geologist. His voyage 

 round the world on the Beagle aroused in him keen interest 

 in the problem of species their variety, their variation 

 according to place and time, their adaptedness to environ- 

 ment. The conviction gradually took possession of his mind 

 that the puzzling facts of geographical range and geological 

 succession which he observed wherever he went were 

 explicable only on the hypothesis that species change. lie 

 was not satisfied with the theories of evolution that had been 

 proposed by his grandfather, by Lamarck, and by K. 

 Geoffrey St Hilaire he did not indeed understand these 

 theories any too well, lie resolved to work out the problem 

 in h-is own way, for his own satisfaction. He tells us all this 

 very clearly in his autobiography. " During the voyage 



1 See Huxley's criticism of it in a Royal Institution lecture of 1851, 

 republished in AV/. .!/<;//., i., pp. 300 4. On its relation to Hacckd's 

 biogenetic law, see below, p. 255. 



- System dcr thierischcn Morphologic, p. 5, 1853. 



