10 HISTORICAL SKETCH 



Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the 

 subject excited much attention. This justly-celebrated nat- 

 uralist first published his views in 1801 ; he much enlarged 

 them in 1809 in his 'Philosophic Zoologique,' and subse- 

 quently, in 1815, in the Introduction to his 'Hist. Nat. des 

 Animaux sans Vertebres.' In these works he upholds the 

 doctrine that species, including man, are descended from 

 other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing at- 

 tention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well 

 as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of 

 miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have been chiefly 

 led to his conclusion on the gradual change of species, by the 

 difficulty of distinguishing species and varieties, by the almost 

 perfect gradation of forms in certain groups, and by the 

 analogy of domestic productions. With respect to the means 

 of modification, he attributed something to the direct action 

 of the physical conditions of life, something to the crossing of 

 already existing forms, and much to use and disuse, that is, 

 to the efifects of habit. To this latter agency he seems to 

 attribute all the beautiful adaptations in nature; — such as the 

 long neck of the giraffe for browsing on the branches of 

 trees. But he likewise believed in a law of progressive de- 

 velopment; and as all the forms of life thus tend to progress, 

 in order to account for the existence at the present day of 

 simple productions, he maintains that such forms are now 

 spontaneously generated.* 



Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, as is stated in his 'Life,' written 

 by his son, suspected, as early as 1795, that what we call 

 species are various degenerations of the same type. It was 



* I have taken the date of the first publication of Lamarck from Isid. 

 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire]s ('Hist. Nat. Generale,' torn, ii, p. 405, 1859) 

 excellent history of opinion on this subject. In this work a full account is 

 given of Buffon's conclusions on the same subject. It is curious how largely 

 my grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous 

 grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his ' Zoonomia ' (vol. i. pp. 500-510), pub- 

 lished in 1794. According to Isid. Geoffroy there is no doubt that Goethe 

 was an extreme partisan of similar views, as shown in the Introduction to a 

 work written in 1794 and 1795, but not published till long afterwards: he 

 has pointedly remarked (' Goethe als Naturforscher,' von Dr. Karl Meding, 

 s. 34) that the future question for naturalists will be how, for instance, 

 cattle got their horns, and not for what they are used. It is rather a singu- 

 lar instance of the manner in which similar views arise at about the same 

 time, that Goethe in Germany, Dr. Darwin in England, and Geoffroy Saint- 

 Hilaire (as we shall immediately see) in France, came to the same conclu- 

 sion on the origin of species, in the years 1794-5. 



