370 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



You often allude to Lamarck's work; I do not know what you think about 

 it, but it appeared to me extremely poor; I got not one fact or idea from it. 



Writing to Lyell in 1863, he says : 



You refer repeatedly to my view as a modification of Lamarck's doctrine 

 of development and progress. . . . Plato, BuflFon, my grandfather before 

 Lamarck, and others, propounded the ohvious views that if species were not 

 created separately they must have come from other species, and I can see 

 nothing else in common between the " Origin " [of Species] and Lamarck. 



Darwin wrote to Hooker in 1844: 



Heaven forfend me from Lamarck's nonsense of a " tendency to progres- 

 sion," " adaptations from the slow willing of animals," etc. But the con- 

 clusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of 

 change are wholly so. 



Darwin had read " The Zoonomia " of his grandfather prior to 1825 

 in which " similar views [to those of Lamarck] are mentioned but 

 without producing any effect" on him. He continues, with his usual 

 candor : 



Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views 

 maintained and praised may have favored my upholding them under a 

 different form in my " Origin of Species." 



It is a regrettable fact that Darwin did not appreciate Lamarck's 

 work. The failure of Lamarck's writings to produce any apparent 

 influence on Darwin may be attributed, I think, to the form in which 

 Lamarck's views are presented. He uses facts as illustrations of his 

 ideas, while with Darwin the facts are all important as furnishing the 

 evidence on which a theory is to be established. He misunderstood 

 Lamarck's view in regard to the inheritance of acquired characters, yet 

 held himself the same opinion in the main as had Lamarck. The 

 modern idea of descent, as a system of branching due to divergence in 

 those species descended from the same parent species, was expounded 

 luminously by Lamarck, yet Darwin discovered it independently for 

 himself. He says: 



But at that time (1844) I overlooked one problem of great importance; 

 and it is astonishing to me . . . how I could have overlooked it and its 

 solution. This problem is the tendency in organic beings descended from 

 the same stock to diverge greatly in character as they become modified. That 

 they have diverged greatly is obvious from the manner in which species of all 

 kinds can be classed under genera, genera under families, families under 

 suborders, and so forth, and I can remember the very spot in the road where 

 to my joy the solution occurred to me. 



It is this same view that Lamarck had fully expounded thirty-five 

 years before. 



"We have now arrived at the period just before the publication of 

 Darwin's famous book. It is sometimes said that the time was ripe 

 for the reception of the ideas formulated by Darwin — it was in the air, 



