REVIEWS 553 



BIOLOGY 



Zoological Philosophy. By J. B. Lamarck. Translated, with an Intro- 

 duction, by Hugh Elliot. [Pp. xcii + 410, 8vo.] (Macmillan & Co. 

 Price 15-y. net.) 



We would say at once that we cordially greet this translation of Lamarck's great 

 work. There is some justification for the opinion that this modern pioneer in 

 Zoological Philosophy has been as hardly treated by more recent students of the 

 subject as he was by the scientific world in his own day. He lives, in fact, in our 

 minds only as the author of a theory which is now almost universally discredited, 

 while the great advances he made in other branches of zoological science, his 

 single-hearted devotion to science, and his courage, at a time when the views he 

 was led to adopt were in opposition to those held by the powerful religious 

 authorities of his day, have been forgotten. 



Lamarck's Zoological Philosophy is indeed a landmark in science, a very 

 remarkable achievement by a very remarkable man. It deserves to be widely 

 read in these controversial days, not only with the object of examining many 

 valuable observations which he made, and which have for long lain hidden in 

 his unread pages or been forgotten, but also for the sake of the example given 

 us of his treatment of controversial matters. In these pages is set forth the broad- 

 minded, generous spirit of the man, his fearless attack on what he deems to be 

 superstition hampering truth, his bold effort to transform a dead into a living 

 science, and, with all, his clear recognition of the fleeting value of those great 

 advances which he had himself made in the science he loved. He gave his life 

 and all his energies to this work without a thought of honour, without a hope of 

 recompense. 



It was his experience of teaching, he tells us in his Preface, which made him 

 feel how useful a philosophical zoology would be, and this " sketch," as he modestly 

 calls it, was designed " to help me in teaching my pupils ; nor had I any other aim 

 in view." And useful it must indeed have been, shedding a flood of light 

 especially upon those lower animals which had for so long been neglected, 

 correlating structure and function, welding together the sciences of comparative 

 anatomy and physiology, and illuminating the whole with a vivid imagination 

 which could not fail to arouse enthusiasm in all but the most stupid minds. 



In the writer's opinion the divorce of physiology from morphology in more 

 modern days has, until recently, seriously interfered with the advance of both 

 these branches of animal biological science. The teaching of any subject which is 

 concerned only with structure becomes rapidly stereotyped. When the principles 

 of structure are once understood by the student, the learning of the details of that 

 science becomes a dry task. The inevitable result surely must be that fewer and 

 fewer students are impelled to specialise in that branch of knowledge, the interest 

 in the subject wanes and the stimulus to research declines. 



Lamarck, although primarily a systematist, clearly recognised that it is not so 

 much the structure of an animal as its behaviour which is of importance to the 

 student of biology ; that it is the correlation of structure with function which will 

 permanently absorb his attention, which will imbue him with living interest in the 

 organisation and in the fate of an animal or of a species. He found that, after 

 all, it is the broad problems of life, the origin, the growth, and the fate of living 

 things which arrest thought and stimulate research, and he knew that only by 

 welding together the study of all branches of biology could he succeed in achieving 

 that object. The result was that he became imbued with many new ideas ; they 



