228 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
tion as to the reason from his own pen, we are led 
to suppose that his studies on the invertebrates, his 
perception of the gradations in the animal scale from 
monad to man, together with his inherent propensity 
to inquire into the origin of things, also his studies on 
fossils, as well as the broadening nature of his zoodlogi- 
cal investigations and his meditations during the 
closing years of the eighteenth century, must grad- 
ually have led to a change of views. 
It was said by Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire that 
Lamarck was “ long a partisan of the immutability of 
species,” * but the use of the word “ partisan ’’ appears 
to be quite incorrect, as he only in one instance ex- 
presses such views. 
The only place where we have seen any statement 
of Lamarck’s earlier opinions is in his Recherches sur 
les Causes des principaux Faits physiques, which was 
written, as the “advertisement ”’ states, “about eigh- 
teen years’’ before its publication in 1794. The 
treatise was actually presented April 22, 1780, to the 
Académie des Sciences.t It will be seen by the fol- 
lowing passages, which we translate, that, as Huxley 
states, this view presents a striking contrast to those 
to be found in the Philosophie zoologique : 
“685. Although my sole object in this article 
[article premier, p. 188] has only been to treat of the 
* Butler’s Lvolution, Old and New (p. 244), and Isidore Geoffroy 
St. Hilaire’s Histoire naturelle générale, tome ii., p. 404 (1859). 
+ After looking in vain through both volumes of the Recherches for 
some expression of Lamarck’s earlier views, I found a mention of it 
in Osborn’s /yvon the Greeks to Darwin, p. 152, and reference to 
Huxley’s Zvolution in Biology, 1878 (‘‘ Darwiniana,” p. 210), where 
the paragraphs translated above are quoted in the original. 
