FACTORS OF ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



overwhelming majority, be construed into an 

 assertion that cutting off a rat s tail will make 

 its progeny tailless, or the similarly indefensible 

 assertion that the giraffe has its long neck as a 

 result of the incessant stretching to which that 

 structure has been subjected by its hungry an 

 cestors, or the inane joke about man s loss of his 

 tail by virtue of his ancestors sitting upon theirs 

 then certainly Larmarckism is sheer nonsense. 

 But Weismannism has been reduced to just such 

 blatant absurdity by some of its adherents, who 

 deny that germ-cells, for instance, can be affected 

 by the presence of alcohol in the body-fluids which 

 circulate in the individual containing them and by 

 which they are themselves nourished or injured. 

 Pledged to deny that any circumstance connected 

 with the individual can in any way affect his off 

 spring, these enthusiasts are compelled simultane 

 ously to flout fact, logic, and probability. 



The first thinker to propose the theory now 

 known as Lamarckism was Erasmus Darwin, 

 physician, zoologist, and poet, who was Charles 

 Darwin s grandfather. Thus Darwinism would be 

 perhaps the best and most accurate name for 

 Lamarckism. Erasmus Darwin s enunciation, how 

 ever, of the principle that individuals alter by re 

 action with their environment, and transmit the 

 altered or acquired character to their descendants, 

 was extremely vague. But in his Philosophie Zo- 

 ologique, which appeared in 1809, Jean Baptiste 

 de Lamarck, already a man of sixty-five, gave de- 



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