66 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES n 



avoir reconnu quelle est la veritable origine de ce globe que nous 

 habitons, comment et par qui il a ete forme." Pp. xix. xx. 



But De Maillet was before his age, and as could 

 hardly fail to happen to one who speculated on a 

 zoological and botanical question before Linnaeus, 

 and on a physiological problem before Haller, he 

 fell into great errors here and there ; and hence, 

 perhaps, the general neglect of his work. Robi net's 

 speculations are rather behind, than in advance 

 of, those of De Maillet ; and though Linnaeus 

 may have played with the hypothesis of trans- 

 mutation, it obtained no serious support until 

 Lamarck adopted it, and advocated it with great 

 ability in his " Philosophic Zoologique." 



Impelled towards the hypothesis of the 

 transmutation of species, partly by his general 

 cosmological and geological views ; partly by the 

 conception of a graduated, though irregularly 

 branching, scale of being, which had arisen out of 

 his profound study of plants and of the lower 

 forms of animal life, Lamarck, whose general line 

 of thought often closely resembles that of De 

 Maillet, made a great advance upon the crude 

 and merely speculative manner in which that writer 

 deals with the question of the origin of living 

 beings, by endeavouring to find physical causes 

 competent to effect that change of one species 

 into another, which De Maillet had only supposed 

 to occur. And Lamarck conceived that he had 

 found in Nature such causes, amply sufficient for 



