PRESENT STATUS OF THE QUESTION 7 



judgment, without undertaking to test the conclu- 

 sions handed down to him. Indeed, until the sciences 

 of Zoology and Botany had been gradually built up 

 and a great body of observed facts had been gathered 

 and arranged in an orderly manner, no other pro- 

 cedure was possible; this did not take place until 

 the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. 

 Even then, however, little real progress was made; 

 scientific opinion was not ripe for such a bold gener- 

 alization and the teachings of Lamarck attracted few 

 followers, especially as the overwhelming authority 

 of Cuvier was exerted against these teachings. 



It is of interest to note that Lamarck (1744-1829) 

 arrived at the evolutionary conception, just as Dar- 

 win did nearly half a century later, through a study 

 of the problem of species. Species was first em- 

 ployed as a term in logic and was given a definite 

 application to animals and plants by John Ray (1628- 

 1705), who indicated by it a group of organisms with 

 marked characteristics in common and freely inter- 

 breeding. The concept received a more precise mean- 

 ing and definition from the great Swedish naturalist 

 Linnaeus (1707-1778), who devised the modern 

 scheme of the classification and nomenclature of 

 animals and plants. Linnaeus was somewhat incon- 

 sistent in his expressions on the subject, but the 

 doctrine which was accepted as his by nearly all of 

 his contemporaries and successors was that species 

 were fixed entities which had been separately created. 

 The Linnaean dogma, which prevailed down to the 



