160 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
hand independent of prejudices even the most wide- 
spread, and on the other profound observers of nature, 
may have a glimpse of this truth, I am very content 
that we should know that it is of the number of those 
views which, in spite of the prejudices of my age, 
I have thought it well to accept.” 
“Why,” he asks, “should not heat and electricity 
act on certain matters under favorable conditions and 
circumstances?” He quotes Lavoisier as saying 
(Chémie, i., p. 202) “that God in creating light had 
spread over the world the principle of organization 
of feeling and of thought’’; and Lamarck suggests 
that heat, ‘this mother of generation, this material 
soul of organized bodies,” may be the chief one of 
the means which nature directly employs to produce 
in the appropriate kind of matter an act of arrange- 
ment of parts, of a primitive germ of organization, 
and consequently of vitalization analogous to sexual 
fecundation. 
“Not only the direct formation of the simplest 
living beings could have taken place, as I shall at- 
tempt to demonstrate, but the following considera- 
tions prove that it is necessary that such germ-forma- 
tions should be effected and be repeated under 
favorable conditions, without which the state of 
things which we observe could neither exist nor 
subsist.” 
His argument is that in the lower polyps (the 
Protozoa) there is no sexual reproduction, no eggs. 
But they perish (as he strangely thought, without 
apparently attempting to verify his belief) in the 
winter. How, he asks, can they reappear? Is it not 
