ON BIOLOGY. 19 



ideas of John Milton on the same subject who wrote in 

 his "Paradise Lost" somewhere about 1667, 



"The sixth, and of creation last, arose 



With evening harps and matin, when God said, 



'Let the earth bring forth soul living in her kind, 



Cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth, 



Each in their kind!' The earth obeyed, and, straight 



Opening her fertile womb, teemed at a birth 



Innumerous living creatures, perfect forms, 



Limbed and full grown. Out of the ground uprose, 



As from his lair, the wild beast, where he wons 



In forest wild, in thicket, brake or den; 



Among the trees in pairs they rose, they walked; 



The cattle in the fields and meadows green; 



Those rare and solitary; these in flocks 



Pasturing at once, and in broad herds upsprung. 



The grassy clods now calved; now half appears 



The tawny lion, pawing to get free 



His hinder parts then springs, as broke from bonds, 



And rampant shakes his brinded mane; the ounce, 



The libbard, and the tiger, as the mole 



Rising, the crumbled earth above them threw 



In hillocks; the swift stag from underground 



Bore up his branching head; scarce from his mold 



Behometh, biggest born of earth, upheaved 



His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose 



As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, 



The river-horse and scaly crocodile, 



At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, 



Insect or worm." 



I have already told you that it was about 1801, the 

 celebrated French naturalist, Lamarck, was the first to 

 use the word Biology; this you will see was about the 

 time that Erasmus Darwin published his "Temple of 

 Nature;" and, Lamarck, in his "Philosophic Zoologique," 

 remarks: "Everything which Nature has caused indi- 

 viduals to acquire or lose by the influence of the circum- 

 stances to which their race is long exposed, and, conse- 

 quently, by the influence of the predominant employment 

 of such organ, or its constant disuse, she preserves by 

 generation to the new individuals proceeding from them, 

 provided that the changes are common to the two sexes, or 

 to those which have produced these new individual.'* 

 (i, 235). The significance of these words must be clear to 

 all, and yet they were written nearly sixty years before 

 Charles Darwin published his "Origin of Species," and 



