412 The Living Plant 



though to his other great provocations was added the torment of 

 chronic ill-health. Of him his friend Huxley has said, "The 

 more one knew of him, the more he seemed the incorporated ideal 

 of a man of science." Possessing vast speculative powers, he 

 nevertheless kept his imagination in touch with the truth by in- 

 cessant and laborious observation and experiment. Yet this 

 greatest of all naturalists was no demi-god, much less a person 

 abnormal to his kind, but a warm-hearted, humanly-interested, 

 honorable-souled gentleman. He lived to see the complete 

 triumph of his life-work, and died in high honor in 1882 at the age 

 of seventy-three.* 



The second in importance, though first in time, of the great 

 explanations of evolution was Lamarck's principle of the "trans- 

 mission of acquired characters." It is almost the exact logical 

 opposite of natural selection, and the life of its author contrasts 

 almost as greatly with that of Darwin. A Frenchman, born in 

 1744, he was at the height of his career about fifty years before 

 Darwin, as Darwin was fifty years before our own time; and it is 

 a coincidence of no little interest that the work in which he most 

 fully expounded his views was published in 1809, exactly fifty 

 years before the Origin of Species. But Lamarck, unlike Darwin, 

 failed to keep his imagination checked by investigation, and his 

 theories in close touch with the facts. Therefore he had the 

 mortification to see his favorite work ignored by his contempo- 

 raries; and he died, in 1829, in disappointment, infirmity and 



* The reader will wish to know more about Darwin, and will find great satisfaction 

 in a study of his Life and Letters (one of the great biographies of literature) by his 

 son Francis. In that work, his own autobiography, and his son's reminiscences, are 

 of first interest, but the most charming glimpses of his character are given by his 

 letters, for example, that written to his wife from Moor Park, in April, 1858, and 

 that written to his friend Asa Gray, on August 9, 1862. And the reader should not 

 fail to read the remarkable obituary of Darwin by Huxley in Nature for April 27, 

 1882, doubtless the noblest tribute ever paid by one scientific man to another. 

 The Origin of Species is not an easy book to read, nor can it be really appreciated 

 by anyone until he has acquired a considerable background in biological knowledge: 

 but after that the reasons for its real greatness become clearly apparent. 



