DARWIN'S DISCOVERIES 21 



scientific man is so greatly inferior to that of Darwin. 

 Lamarck, sitting in his study, said animals (and plants 

 too) must be affected by the conditions around them, so 

 that an individual as it lives and grows becomes to a 

 certain degree slightly changed by and adapted to those 

 conditions. This, he said, we all see in human beings 

 and familiar animals and plants. Now, he said, we have 

 only to admit that the changes so acquired are (especially 

 when both parents have been similarly changed) trans- 

 mitted to the young in the process of generation, and to 

 some degree "intensified," in order to recognise that of 

 necessity there is in nature a constant change and pro- 

 gression of living forms, consisting in a more and more 

 elaborate " adaptation " to the conditions of life, which 

 will be varied and lead to new adaptations as the living 

 things spread over the earth or as geological changes 

 occur. He cited the long neck of the giraffe as an 

 example of what he meant. In regions where there was 

 frequent and extensive drought, a deer-like creature 

 would eat the lower leaves of trees when the grass was 

 dried up and dead. It would strain and stretch its neck 

 in reaching after the higher leaves, and the individuals 

 thus straining and stretching would become an inch or 

 two longer in the neck in consequence. These individuals 

 would, said Lamarck, transmit their increased length of 

 neck to their offspring, who again would strain and 

 stretch after higher leaves, and get a further increase of 

 neck-length, and so it would go on, little by little, over 

 many thousand generations, until the neck-stretchers 

 had become well marked and distinguished by their long 

 necks from such of their ancestral stock as survived in 

 other regions where, the grass being good, there was 

 no inducement to straining and stretching the neck. 



Now the great difference between Lamarck and 

 Darwin is that Lamarck was quite content to state 



