HISTORICAL SKETCH OF EVOLUTION. 63 



felt that he had gone as far in the right direction as 

 was then desirable. Buffon put forward his opinions, 

 with great reserve and yet with hardly less frankness, in 

 volume after volume from 1749 to 1788, the year of his 

 death, but they do not appear to have taken root at 

 once in France. They took root in England, and were 

 thence transplanted back to France. 



III. A development in England of the Buffonian 

 system, marked by glimpses of the unity between 

 offspring and parents, and broad suggestions to the 

 effect that the former must be considered as capable of 

 remembering, under certain circumstances, what had 

 happened to it, and what it did, when it was part of the 

 personality of those from whom it had descended. 



A definite belief, openly expressed, that not only 

 are many species mutable, but that all living forms, 

 whether animal or vegetable, are descended from a 

 single, or at any rate from not many, original low 

 forms of life, and this as the direct consequence of the 

 actions and requirements of the living forms them- 

 selves, and as the indirect consequence of changed 

 conditions. A definite cause is thus supposed to under- 

 lie variations, and the resulting adaptations become 

 purposive ; but this was not said, nor, I am afraid, seen. 



This is the original Darwinism of Dr. Erasmus 

 Darwin. It was put forward in his ' Zoonomia/ in 

 1794, and was adopted almost in its entirety by 

 Lamarck, who, when he had caught the leading idea 

 (probably through a French translation of the ' Loves 

 of the Plants,' which appeared in 1800), began to 

 expound it in 1801; in 1802, 1803, 1806, and 1809, 



