384 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 
or its modern form, Neolamarckism. Lamarck had 
already, so far as he could without a knowledge of 
modern morphology, embryology, cytology, and his- 
tology, suggested those fundamental principles of 
transformism on which rests the selective principle. 
Had his works been more accessible, or, where avail- 
able, more carefully read, and his views more fairly 
represented; had he been favored in his lifetime by 
a single supporter, rather than been unjustly criti- 
cised by Cuvier, science would have made more rapid 
progress, for it is an axiomatic truth that the general 
acceptance of a working evolutionary theory has 
given a vast impetus to biology. 
We will now give a brief historical summary of the 
history of opinion held by Lamarckians regarding the 
causes of the “ origin of the fittest,” the rise of varia- 
tions, and the appearance of a population of plant 
and animal forms sufficiently extensive and differ- 
entiated to allow for the play of the competitive 
forces, and of the more passive selective agencies 
which began to operate in pre-cambrian times, or as 
soon as the earth became fitted for the existence of 
living beings. 
The first writer after Lamarck to work along the 
lines he laid down was Mr. Herbert Spencer. In 
1866-71, in his epochal and remarkably suggestive 
Principles of Biology, the doctrine of use and disuse 
is implicated in his statements as to the effects of 
motion on structure in general; * and in his theory as 
to the origin of the notochord, and of the segmenta- 
*iVOloii., ps LOZ .eLo7 L- 
