Huxley on Lamarck 97 



on " Protoplasm and Cells," and on the " Common 

 Structure of the Animal and Plant Kingdoms," he had 

 reached the conclusion that the two main divisions of 

 the living world were formed of the same stuff, dis- 

 played in identical fashion the elementary functions of 

 life, and were creatures of the same order. But, not- 

 withstanding this close approach to modern concep- 

 tions, he was not an evolutionist. When, in public, he 

 expressed deliberate convictions, these convictions were 

 against the general idea of evolution, until very shortly 

 before 1S59. In this opposition he was .supported 

 partly by the critical scepticism of his mind, which in 

 all things made him singularly unwilling to accept anj- 

 theories of any kind, but chiefly from the fact that tlie 

 books of the two chief supporters of evolutionary con- 

 ceptions impressed him very unfavourably. Huxley 

 writes : 



"I had studied Ivamarck attentively, and I had read the 

 Vesiiges with due care ; but neither of them afforded me any 

 good grouud for changing my negative and critical attitude. 

 As for the Vestiges, I confess that the book simply irritated me 

 b)' the prodigious ignorance and thoroughly unscientific nabit 

 of mind manifested by the writer. If it had any influence on 

 me at all, it set me against evolution ; and the only review I 

 ever have qualms of conscience about, on the ground of need- 

 less savagery, is one I wrote on the Vesiiges while under that 

 influence. With respect to the Philosophie Zoologique, it is 

 no reproach to Lamarck to say that the discussion of the 

 species question in that work, whatever might be said for it in 

 1809, was miserably below the level of the knowledge of half a 

 century later. In that interval of time, the elucidation of the 

 structure of the lower animals and plants had given rise to 

 wholly new conceptions of their relations ; histology and em- 

 bryology, in the modern sense, had been created ; physiology 

 had been reconstituted ; the facts of distribution, geological 

 and geographical, had been prodigiously multiplied and re- 

 duced to order. To any biologist whose studies had carried 

 7 



