LAMARCK A SYSTEMATIST 227 



organs as witnesses to that unity. He seems not to have 

 known of the recapitulation theory, of which he might have 

 made such good use as powerful evidence for evolution. 

 Even with the German transcendentalists, with whom in the 

 looseness of his generalisations he shows some affinity, he 

 seems not to have been specially acquainted. 



He was interested more in the problems suggested to 

 him by his daily work in the museum. He wanted to know 

 why species graded so annoyingly into one another ; he 

 wanted to examine critically his haunting suspicion that 

 species were really not distinct, and that classification was 

 purely conventional. The question, too, of the adaptation 

 of species to their environment, the problem of ecological 

 adaptation, in distinction to that of functional adaptation 

 which interested Cuvier so greatly, came vividly before him 

 as he worked through the vast collections of the museum. 

 He was the first systematist to occupy himself in a 

 philosophical manner with the problems of general biology. 

 He introduced new problems and a new way of looking at 

 old. With Lamarck the problem of species and the problem 

 of ecological adaptation enter into general biology. 



The one point in which he does definitely carry on the 

 thought of his predecessors is his conception of the animal 

 kingdom as forming a scale of (functional) perfection. He 

 did not go to the same extreme as Bonnet; he did not even 

 consider that the animal series was a continuation of the 

 vegetable series ; in his opinion they formed two diverging 

 scales. He recognised, too, that among animals there was 

 no simple and regular gradation from the lowest to the 

 highest, but that the orderly progression was disturbed and 

 diverted by the necessity of adaptation to different environ- 

 ments. It is interesting to note that in developing this 

 idea he arrived at a roughly accurate distinction between 

 homologous and analogous structures. More importance, he 

 thought, was to be attributed in classifying animals to 

 characters which appeared due to the "plan of Nature" 

 than to such as were produced by an external modifying 

 cause (p. 299). But he did not formulate the distinction in 

 any strictly morphological way. 



As his ideas developed he laid less stress upon the sim- 



