264 EVOLUTION, OLD AND NEW. 



animals, and show what should be their fittest classi- 

 fication and arrangement." * 



It seems unnecessary to give Lamarck's intentions 

 with regard to his second and third parts, as they do 

 not here concern us; they deal with the origin of life 

 and mind. 



The first chapter of the work opens with the im- 

 portance of bearing in mind the difference between the 

 conventional and the natural, that is to say, between 

 words and things. Here, as indeed largely throughout 

 this part of his work, he follows Buffon, by whom he is 

 evidently influenced. 



"The conventional deals with systems of arrange- 

 ment, classification, orders, families, genera, and the 

 nomenclature, whether of different sections or of indi- 

 vidual objects. 



"An arrangement should be called systematic, or 

 arbitrary, when it does not conform to the genealogical 

 order taken by nature in the development of the 

 things arranged, and when, by consequence it is not 

 founded upon well-considered analogies. There is such 

 a thing as a natural order in every department of 

 nature ; it is the order in which its several component 

 items have been successively developed.! 



" Some lines certainly seem to have been drawn by 

 Nature herself. It was hard to believe that mammals, 

 for example, and birds, were not well-defined classes. 

 Nevertheless the sharpness of definition was an illusion, 

 and due only to our limited knowledge. The ornitho- 

 rhynchus and the echidna bridge the gulf.j 



* Phil. Zool.,' torn. i. pp. 34, 35. f Page 42. J Page 46. 



