302 Relation of Use and Disuse to Evolution 



of the threat, or promise, that the sins of the fathers would 

 be visited upon their descendants for a specified number of 

 generations. So commonplace has the thought been in the 

 past that it was accepted uncritically both by those who were 

 rigidly orthodox with respect to the fixity of species, and by 

 those who assumed an evolutionary process of some kind to 

 account for the existing fauna and flora. 



ham arch 



During the year 1809, which saw the birth of Charles 

 Darwin, there appeared the masterpiece of Jean Baptiste 

 Lamarck, the Vhilosophie Xoologiqiie, In this was embodied 

 the widely accepted belief in the inheritance of the effects 

 of use and disuse, as part of what was after all the first at- 

 tempt to formulate a scientific hypothesis to explain the 

 evolution of living forms. 



Lamarck was the youngest of eleven children and 

 suffered from his earliest years the hardships and privations 

 of poverty and lack of opportunity for his exceptional in- 

 tellectual ability. He was sent to a Jesuit college, much 

 against his will; and abandoned theology when his father 

 died, to take up the study of medicine. From this he shifted, 

 under the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau, to become a 

 botanist of distinction. After the French Revolution the 

 stigma of monarchism had to be removed from the royal 

 garden and Lamarck worked out the plan for reorganiz- 

 ing the botanical garden and the natural history museum. 

 There seemed to be good political reasons why somebody 

 else should become head of the botanical department, so 

 Lamarck was made professor of invertebrate zoology — 

 a field that was entirely new to him, and for that matter, 

 not very old in the world of thought. So at fifty years of 

 age, when he had attained recognition as an authority in 

 two branches of science, botany and paleontology, he plunged 

 with energy into the task before him, and became shortly the 

 leading authority in a third branch, invertebrate zoology. 



