8 Darwin's Predecessors 



ment of the history of mankind, that all warm-blooded animals have 

 arisen from one living filament ?".... "This idea of the gradual genera- 

 tion of all things seems to have been as familiar to the ancient 

 philosophers as to the modern ones, and to have given rise to the 

 beautiful hieroglyphic figure of the Trpwrov MOV, or first great egg, 

 produced by night, that is, whose origin is involved in obscurity, and 

 animated by "Ep<9, that is, by Divine Love ; from whence proceeded 

 all things which exist." 



Lamarck (1744 1829) seems to have become an evolutionist inde- 

 pendently of Erasmus Darwin's influence, though the parallelism 

 between them is striking. He probably owed something to Buftbn, 

 but he developed his theory along a different line. Whatever view be 

 held in regard to that theory there is no doubt that Lamarck was a 

 thorough-going evolutionist. Professor Haeckel speaks of the Philo- 

 sophic Zoologique as "the first connected and thoroughly logical 

 exposition of the theory of descent 1 ." 



Besides the three old masters, as we may call them, Buffon, 

 Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, there were other quite convinced 

 pre-Darwinian evolutionists. The historian of the theory of descent 

 must take account of Treviranus whose Biology or Philosophy 

 of Animate Nature is full of evolutionary suggestions ; of Etienne 

 Geoffrey St Hilaire, who in 1830, before the French Academy of 

 Sciences, fought with Cuvier, the fellow-worker of his youth, an 

 intellectual duel on the question of descent ; of Goethe, one of the 

 founders of morphology and the greatest poet of Evolution who, in his 

 eighty- first year, heard the tidings of Geoffrey St Hilaire's defeat with 

 an interest which transcended the political anxieties of the time ; and 

 of many others who had gained with more or less confidence and 

 clearness a new outlook on Nature. It will be remembered that 

 Darwin refers to thirty-four more or less evolutionist authors in his 

 Historical Sketch, and the list might be added to. Especially when 

 we come near to 1858 do the numbers increase, and one of the most 

 remarkable, as also most independent champions of the evolution- 

 idea before that date was Herbert Spencer, who not only marshalled 

 the arguments in a very forcible way in 1852, but applied the formula 

 in detail in his Principles of Psychology in 1855 2 . 



It is right and proper that we should shake ourselves free from 

 all creationist appreciations of Darwin, and that we should recognise 

 the services of pre-Darwinian evolutionists who helped to make the 

 time ripe, yet one cannot help feeling that the citation of them is apt to 

 suggest t\vo fallacies. It may suggest that Darwin simply entered into 



1 See Alpheus S. Packard, Lamarck, the. Founder of Evolution, His Life and Work, 

 with Translations of his writings on Organic Evolution. London, 1901. 



2 See Edward Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution, London, p. 161, 1897. 



