HISTORICAL SKETCH 13 



he maintains that such forms are now spontaneously 

 generated.' 



GeoflEroy 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 not until 1828 that he published his 

 conviction that the same forms have not been perpetuated 

 since the origin of all things. Geoffrey seems to have 

 relied chiefly on the conditions of life, or the '''monde 

 amhiani''' as the cause of change. He was cautious in 

 drawing conclusions, and did not believe that existing 

 species are now undergoing modification; and, as his son 

 adds, "C'est done un probl^oie k reserver enti^rement 

 ^ I'avenir, suppose m^me que I'avenir doive avoir prise 

 sur lui. " 



In 1813, Dr. W. 0. Wells read before the Royal 

 Society "An Account of a White female, part of whose 

 skin resembles that of a Negro"; but his paper was not 

 published until his famous "Two Essays upon Dew and 

 Single Vision" appeared in 1818. In this paper he dis- 



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

 Greoffroy Sainl-Hilaire's ("Hiat. Nat. G^nerale," torn. ii. p. 405, 1859) excel- 

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

 BufEon's conclusions on the same subject. It is curious how largely my grand- 

 father, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipaled the views and erroneous grounds of 

 opinion of Lamarck in his "Zoonomia" (vol. i. pp. 500-610), published iu 1794. 

 According to Isid. Geoffrey 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 ques- 

 tion for naturalists will be how, for instance, cattle got their horns, and not for 

 what they are used. It is rather a singular instance of the manner in which 

 similar views arise at about the same time that Goethe in Germany, Dr. Darwia 

 in England, and Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (as we shall immediately see) in France, 

 came to the same conclusion on the origin of species, in the years 1794-95. 



