NEOLAMARCKISM 307 
has for its foundation a combination of the factors 
suggested by the Buffon and Geoffroy St. Hilaire 
school, which insisted on the direct action of the 
milieu, and of Lamarck, who relied both on the di- 
rect (plants and lowest animals) and on the indirect 
action of the environment, adding the important 
factors of need and of change of habits resulting 
either in the atrophy or in the development of 
organs by disuse or use, with the addition of the 
hereditary transmission of characters acquired in the 
lifetime of the individual. 
““ Lamarck’s views, owing to the early date of his 
work, which was published in 1809, before the foun- 
dation of the sciences of embryology, cytology, 
paleontology, zodgeography, and in short all that 
distinguishes modern biology, were necessarily some- 
what crude, though the fundamental factors he sug- 
gested are those still invoked by all thinkers of 
Lamarckian tendencies. 
on the organism, resulting at times in a new genus, or even a family 
type. Natural selection, acting through thousands, and sometimes 
millions, of generations of animals and piants, often operates too 
slowly ; there are gaps which have been, so to speak, intentionally 
left by Nature. Moreover, natural selection was, as used by some 
writers, more an idea than a wera causa. Natural selection also 
begins with the assumption of a tendency to variation, and presup- 
poses a world already tenanted by vast numbers of animals among 
which a struggle for existence was going on, and the few were vic- 
torious over the many. But the entire inadequacy of Darwinism to 
account for the primitive origin of life forms, for the original diversity 
in the different branches of the tree of life forms, the interdependence 
of the creation of ancient faunas and floras on geological revolutions, 
and consequent sudden changes in the envircnment of organisms, has 
convinced us that Darwinism is but one of a number of factors of a 
true evolution theory; that it comes in play only as the last term of 
a series of evolutionary agencies or causes; and that it rather ac- 
counts, as first suggested by the Duke of Argyll, for the preservation 
of forms than for their origination. We may, in fact, compare Dar- 
winism to the apex of a pyramid, the larger mass of the pyramid 
representing the complex of theories necessary to account for the 
world of life as it has been and now is. In other words, we believe 
ina modified and greatly extended Lamarckianism, or what may be 
called Neo-Lamarckianism.” 
