EVOLUTION XXXV 



worm, starfish, etc., ancestors. ^ He passed through the 

 stage of being a scorpion and a spider. He traversed in 

 turn every known species of insect. He was a tapeworm, 

 a sea-anemone, a polyp and an amoeba. For myself, I fail 

 to see how he could have been an intestinal worm when 

 there were no such things as intestines, or a liver-fluke 

 when there were no such things as livers. His existence as 

 a flea must have been precarious, when there was nothing 

 more substantial to live upon than jelly-fishes, starfishes, 

 and parasitic worms. Indeed, the doctrine is wholly absurd 

 the moment it is consistently thought out. It was to remedy 

 absurdities of a somewhat different kind that Lamarck in- 

 vented his factor of use-inheritance : and it is that factor 

 which he would have at once invoked to explain away such 

 difficulties as I have named. 



The fact remains however that, leaving aside for the 

 moment the influence of environment, Lamarck assumed a 

 perfectly even development to proceed in a straight line 

 throughout the animal scale : and he assumed that this 

 development was due to an innate power conferred upon the 

 lowest of animals at the moment of their spontaneous genera- 

 tion. Accordingly, one of the longest chapters in the whole 

 work is devoted to an account of the gradual progress in 

 organisation observed as we pass along the animal scale. 

 In point of fact, Lamarck inverts the natural order, and 

 begins with the highest mammals, proceeding to the lowest 

 infusorians. Thus, instead of a gradually increasing com- 

 plexity, he finds a gradually diminishing complexity, as he 

 passes along, or as he calls it a " degradation of organisation." 

 That Lamarck should have traversed the series in the wrong 

 direction is doubtless due to the fact, that from the time 

 of Aristotle to the time of Lamarck, every systematist, 

 including even Linnaeus, had commenced his classification 

 with the highest animals and finished it with the lowest. 



^ I am here alluding to the classification presented in the main work. This classifica- 

 tion was greatly improved in the " Additions " to Part I., as I shall show later ; and 

 many of these animals were then referred by Lamarck to collateral branches, off the 

 main line of development leading to man. 



