THE THEORY OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 1G7 



in the post-Darwinian period of the nineteenth century, they 

 fail to produce results. When systematic minds of a high 

 order reach new territory they often miss the significance of 

 facts to an amazing degree, as was the case with Daubenton 

 the anatomist and Linnaeus the classifier. 



The weakness of the pseudo-philosopher, who dabbles 

 in science, is that his theories always tend to outrun his facts. 

 But this is soon corrected. In the case under discussion it is 

 ungenerous for the biologist not to acknowledge the insight 

 of these eighteenth century savants. For despite their 

 dilettantism, they perceived what the majority of the techni- 

 cal scientific workers did not recognize until a century later. 

 One of the myths of the history of biology is the tradition 

 that the evolutionary doctrine was not definitely formulated, 

 for lack of facts, until about the middle of the nineteenth 

 century. This is not a fair historical statement and it does 

 grave injustice to those thinkers of the preceding century, 

 who saw the meaning of biological facts at a time when the 

 majority of naturalists were blind. It was blindness, rather 

 than scientific caution that caused the scientific formulation 

 of the evolutionary theory to be rejected for more than a 

 century. 



THE LAMARCKIAN THEORY OF THE CAUSES OF EVOLUTION 



Not only was the earliest scientific formulation of the 

 theory of organic evolution made during the eighteenth 

 century, but the same century produced, in the Lamarckian 

 Hypothesis, a theory of the causes of evolution. Even if this 

 theory has scant support at the present day, its promulga- 

 tion is indicative of the extent to which evolutionism had 

 developed by the opening years of the nineteenth century. 12 



12 The date of the first publication of Lamarck's "Philosophie Zoologique" 

 was 1809, and other publications, containing references to the problem of 

 organic evolution appeared during the first fifteen years of the century. But 

 in view of the fact that the first decade of the nineteenth century was in- 

 tellectually a continuation of the eighteenth century period, the work of 



