EVOLUTION 43 



the eighteenth century shrugged its fat shoulders and 

 dimpled the corners of its ample mouth, have grown to be 

 the chief cornerstone of all accepted modern zoological 

 science. 



In the first year of the present century, Lamarck 

 followed Erasmus Darwin's lead with an open avowal that 

 in his belief all animals and plants were really descended 

 from one or a few common ancestors. He held that 

 organisms were just as much the result of law, not of 

 miraculous interposition, as suns and worlds and all the 

 natural phenomena around us generally. He saw that 

 what naturalists call a species differs from what naturalists 

 call a variety, merely in the way of being a little more 

 distinctly marked, a little less like its nearest congeners 

 elsewhere. He recognised the perfect gradation of forms 

 by which in many cases one species after another merges 

 into the next on either side of it. He observed the analogy 

 between the modifications induced by man and the modi- 

 fications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough- 

 going and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient 

 opinion which Society still believes to have been due to 

 the works of Charles Darwin. In one point only, a minor 

 point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal importance 

 to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not antici- 

 pate his more famous successor. He thought organic 

 evolution was wholly due to the direct action of surround- 

 ing circumstances, to the intercrossing of existing forms, 

 and above all to the actual efforts of animals themselves. 

 In other words, he had not discovered natural selection, the 

 cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. 

 For him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant 

 reaching up to the boughs of trees ; the monkey had 

 acquired its opposable thumb by constant grasping at the 

 neighbouring branches ; and the serpent had acquired its 



