REPRESENTATIVE LAMARCKIANS 263 



the real building up of living matter must occur mys- 

 teriously in periods of rest. In reality, however, what 

 is spent during the functioning of organs is not living 

 matter but reserve substances, dead matter. If an 

 active muscle becomes thinner, it is because it con- 

 sumes adipose reserve matter; but its real substance, 

 muscle substance, is developed by activity." 8 



Functional assimilation is regarded by Le Dantec 

 as the solution of the question pending between Dar- 

 winians and Lamarckians. Lamarck had this phe- 

 nomenon in mind when he formulated his first law, and 

 adaptation is merely the direct and immediate result 

 of functional assimilation. 



In order to prove that Darwinism and Lamarck- 

 ism are but two different methods of approaching a 

 subject, Le Dantec relates a pathological case, the in- 

 fection of sheep by anthrax bacillus, using first the 

 Darwinian and then the Lamarckian vocabulary. 

 This is the Darwinian account of the case: "Let us 

 take any bacterial culture in which variations whose 

 cause is unknown to us have taken place along several 

 lines. We inoculate a sheep with this culture. 

 (This is a truly Darwinian case, for the conditions in 

 which the bacilli have varied in the previous dead 

 environments are not directly related to their fitness 

 to live in sheep, and the variations they have under- 



s La Crise du Transformisme, p. 261 and following ; Elements de 

 Philosophic Biologique, pp. 66-69. 



