LAMARCK 



traits which have been acquired by the activities of 

 the organism itself and those which have been forced 

 upon it by external agents. And yet, his doctrine is 

 really simpler and is more explicitly and logically de- 

 veloped than is that of Darwin. 



Lamarck begins with the postulate that the Sub- 

 lime Author of all existing things creates directly 

 only the simplest forms of organisms, what we now 

 call protoplasmic monads, and also establishes, as a 

 law of nature, ''an order of things which should give 

 existence successively to all that we see as well as to 

 all that exists and that we do not know.'" Thus, from 

 the beginning, the protoplasm is endowed per se with 

 the tendency to vary, in each generation, towards an 

 increasing complexity of structure and also to respond 

 to changes of environment. The cause of this innate 

 tendency to vary is unknown but it is a fact, and, 

 although Darwin and the Darwinians sneer at this 

 assumption as being irrational and unscientific, we 

 find that they, themselves, are forced to postulate this 

 tendency to vary without having found the cause for 

 it; they merely abolish the word, innate. If we could 

 suppose the environment to remain unchanged and 

 uniform, then each existing form would have de- 

 scended linearly from some originally created proto- 

 plasm. But, since the environment has and does con- 

 tinually change, the succession of animals "form a 

 branching series, irregularly graduated and which has 



^Philosophic Zoologique, vol. I, p. 74 [Trans, by Elliot, p. 36]. 



C 173 n 



