442 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES 



excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first pub- 

 lished his views in 1801; he much enlarged them in 1809 in his 

 "Philosophie Zoologique," and subsequently, 1815, in the Intro- 

 duction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertebres." In these 

 works he upholds the doctrine that all species, including man, are 

 descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of 

 arousing attention 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 per- 

 fect gradations 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 con- 

 ditions of life, something to the crossing of already existing forms, 

 and much to use and disuse, that is, to the effects 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 

 development; 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, "s early as 1795, that what we call species are 

 various degenerations of the same type. It was not until 1828 

 that he published his conviction that the same forms have not 

 been perpetuated since the origin of all things. Geoffroy seems to 

 have relied chiefly on the conditions of life, or the "monde am- 



* I have taken the date of the j&rst publication of Lamarck from Isidore 

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

 cellent 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. 509-510), 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 afterward: 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 singular in- 

 stance 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 conclusion on the 

 origin of species, in the years 1794-95. 



