18 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
mais seulement des individus?’’* In his Descours sur 
l’Inégalité parm les Hommes is the following passage, 
which shows, as Giard says, that Rousseau perfectly 
understood the influence of the wzz/zeu and of wants 
on the organism; and this brilliant writer seems to 
have been the first to suggest natural selection, though 
only in the case of man, when he says that the weaker 
in Sparta were eliminated in order that the superior 
and stronger of the race might survive and be main- 
tained. 
“« Accustomed from infancy to the severity of the 
weather and the rigors of the seasons, trained to 
undergo fatigue, and obliged to defend naked and 
without arms their life and their prey against ferocious 
beasts, or to escape them by flight, the men acquired 
an almost invariably robust temperament ; the infants, 
bringing into the world the strong constitution of 
their fathers, and strengthening themselves by the 
same kind of exercise as produced it, have thus ac- 
quired all the vigor’of which the human species is 
capable. Nature uses them precisely as did the law 
of Sparta the children of her citizens. She rendered 
strong and robust those with a good constitution, and 
destroyed all the others. Our societies differ in this 
respect, where the state, in rendering the children 
burdensome to the father, indirectly kills them be- 
fore birth.’’+ 
Soon Lamarck abandoned not only a military 
career, but also music, medicine, and the bank, and 
devoted himself exclusively to science. He was now 
twenty-four years old, and, becoming a student of 
* Dictionnatre des Termes dela Botanique. Art. APHRODITE. 
+ Discours sur l’ Origine et les Fondements de 0 Inégalité parnit 
les Hommes. 1754. 
