232 LAMARCK AND DARWIN 



biologists realise as they never did before the vast importance 

 of environment. He took biology into the open air, away 

 from the museum and the dissecting-room. 



Naturally this attitude was not without its drawbacks. It 

 led him to take only a lukewarm interest in the problems of 

 morphology. It is true he used the facts of morphology with 

 great effect as powerful arguments for evolution, but it was 

 not from such facts that he deduced his theory to account for 

 evolution. It is questionable indeed whether the theory of 

 natural selection is properly applicable to the problems of 

 form. It was invented to account for the evolution of specific 

 differences and of ecological adaptations ; it was not primarily 

 intended as an explanation of the more wonderful and more 

 mysterious facts of the convenancc des parties and the inter- 

 action of structure and function. Perhaps Darwin did not 

 realise this inner aspect of adaptation quite so vividly as he 

 did the more superficial adaptation of organisms to their 

 environment. It was, perhaps, his lack of morphological 

 training and experience that led him to disregard the prob- 

 lems of form, or at least to realise very insufficiently 

 their difficulty. 



It is in any case very significant that only a small part of 

 his Origin of Species is devoted to the discussion of morphologi- 

 cal questions only one chapter out of the fourteen contained 

 in the first edition. 



Though the theory of natural selection took little account 

 of the problems of form, Darwin's masterly vindication of the 

 theory of evolution was of immense service to morphology, 

 and Darwin himself was the first to point out what a great 

 light evolution threw upon all morphological problems. In 

 a few pages of the Origin he laid the foundations of 

 evolutionary morphology. 



We have here to consider his interpretation of morpho- 

 logical facts and its relation to the current morphology of his 

 time. 



The sketch of his theory, written in I842, 1 shows a very 

 significant division into two parts the first dealing with the 

 positive facts of variability and the theory of natural selection, 



1 T/ie Foundations of the Origin of Species^ a Sketch written in 1842. 

 Kd. F. Darwin, Cambridge, 1909. 



