66 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 
avoir reconnu quelle est la véritable origine de ce globe que nous - 
habitons, comment et par qui il a été formé.”—Pp. xix. xx. _ 
But De Maillet was before his age, andas could 
hardly fail to happen to one who speculated on a 
zoological and botanical question before Linnzeus, 
and on a physiological problem before Haller, he 
fell into great errors here and there; and hence, 
perhaps, the general neglect of his work. Robinet’s” 
speculations are rather behind, than in advance 
of, those of De Maillet; and though Linnzus 
may have played with the hypothesis of trans- 
mutation, it obtained no serious support until 
Lamarck adopted it, and advocated it with gree 
ability in his “ Philosophie Zoologique.” 
Impelled towards the hypothesis of the 
transmutation of species, partly by his general 
cosmological and geological views; partly by the 
conception of a graduated, though irregularly 
branching, scale of being, which had arisen out of 
his profound study of plants and of the lower 
forms of animal life, Lamarck, whose general line 
of thought often closely resembles that of De 
Maillet, made a great advance upon the crude 
and merely speculative manner in which that writer 
deals with the question of the origin of living 
beings, by endeavouring to find physical causes 
competent to effect that change of one species 
into another, which De Maillet had only supposed 
to occur. And Lamarck conceived that he had 
found in Nature such causes, amply sufficient for 
J 
et ee ee 
