542 



ON THE RECEPTION OF 



known to me whose knowledge and capacity compelled re- 

 spect, and who was, at the same time, a thorough-going evo- 

 lutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I 

 made, I think, in 1852, and then entered into the bonds of a 

 friendship which, I am happy to think, has known no inter- 

 ruption. Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on 

 this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and co- 

 piousness of apt illustration could not drive me from my ag- 

 nostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds : firstly, 

 that up to that time, the evidence in favor of transmutation 

 was wholly insufficient ; and, secondly, that no suggestion re- 

 specting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had 

 been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenom- 

 ena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I 

 really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable. 



In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' 

 ' Biologie.' However, I had studied Lamarck attentively 

 and I had read the ' Vestiges ' with due care ; but neither of 

 them afforded me any good ground for changing my nega- 

 tive and critical attitude. As for the ' Vestiges,' 1 confess 

 that the book simply irritated me by the prodigious ignorance 

 and thoroughly unscientific habit 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 con- 

 science about, on the ground of needless savagery, is one I 

 wrote on the ' Vestiges ' while under that influence. 



With respect to the ' Philosophic Zoologique,' it is no re- 

 proach 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 

 embryology, in the modern sense, had been created; physi- 

 ology had been reconstituted ; the facts of distribution, geo- 

 logical and geographical, had been prodigiously multiplied 

 and reduced to order. To any biologist whose studies had 



