3l6 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



on the observer and the shape of the plants that dominate the landscape. 

 Thus he produces semi-artistic, semi-scientific pictures of vegetation in 

 different latitudes; he declares that each latitude possesses its own charac- 

 teristic natural physiognomy, and he finally differentiates between certain 

 vegetable types, not according to systematic characters, but according to the 

 impression the observer receives of their form as a whole. He distinguishes 

 sixteen of these landscape-forming vegetable types, though he states that 

 their number could certainly be increased. Among these types may be men- 

 tioned: the palm type, the banana shape, the heather type, the cactus type, 

 the orchid type, the fir type, grasses, ferns, lilies. The whole of this concep- 

 tion of plant life and this grouping of its individual components according 

 to common conditions of life, instead of according to the nomenclature 

 of species, represent a new idea; it is true that here Humboldt has learnt 

 something, as he himself acknowledges, from BufFon, as well as from a 

 number of earlier describers of landscapes, but out of these ideas and as the 

 result of his own observations he created a new field for research, which was 

 cultivated and extended at a later period with great success. 



His cosmos 

 During the last decades of his life Humboldt devoted himself to formulating 

 a universal cosmology, which was intended to reproduce every imaginable 

 conception of and all the known facts about the universe : the purely scientific, 

 the historical, and the artistic. This gigantic work, the execution of which 

 was far beyond the powers of one single man, he called Kosmos; its first part 

 was published in his seventy-fifth year and a final part of the unfinished work 

 came out after his death. Never has any natural scientist of modern times 

 conceived a plan on a grander scale, and though its execution is naturally 

 both fragmentary and defective, the work nevertheless contains a vast 

 amount of valuable material in the way of facts and is, besides, like all 

 Humboldt's work, unequalled in style. Romantic natural philosophy's idea 

 of a uniform conception of nature has received in Humboldt's Kosmos its 

 most glorious memorial; it seems almost symbolical that its creator should 

 have died in the same year as that in which Darwin published his work on 

 the origin of species; the modern theory of evolution stepped in where 

 natural philosophy ended. 



3 . Lamarck 



Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, usually styled Chevalier de 

 Lamarck, was born in Picardy , in northern France, in 1744, ^^^ ^^ ^^^ young- 

 est of a large and poor noble family. At an early age he was sent to a Jesuit 

 school with a view to eventually securing a comfortable living as a priest. 



