THE WORLD INTO WHICH DARWIN WAS BORN u 



death, in 1831, the unwearied old philosopher continued 

 to devote his whole time and energy, in blindness and 

 poverty, to the elucidation of this interesting and im- 

 portant subject. A bold, acute, and vigorous thinker, 

 trained in the great school of Diderot and D'Alembert, 

 with something of the vivid Celtic poetic imagination, 

 and a fearless habit of forming his own conclusions 

 irrespective of common or preconceived ideas, Lamarck 

 went to the very root of the matter in the most deter- 

 mined fashion, and openly proclaimed in the face of 

 frowning officialism under the Napoleonic reaction his 

 profound conviction that all species, including man, 

 were descended by modification from one or more 

 primordial forms. In Charles Darwin's own words, 

 ' 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 perfect gradation of 

 forms in certain groups, and by the analogy of domestic 

 productions. With respect to the means of modifica- 

 tion, 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 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.' He believed, in short, that 

 animals had largely developed themselves, by functional 

 effort followed by increased powers and abilities. 



