34 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC 



De Blainville records that "the Academy did 

 not even allow it to be printed in the form in 

 which it was pronounced/' and it is said that 

 portions of it had to be omitted as unfit for 

 publication. Haeckel, speaking of Lamarck's 

 great book, "Zoological Philosophy/' com- 

 plains that "Cuvier, Lamarck's greatest op- 

 ponent, in his 'Report on the Progress of 

 Natural Science,' in which the most unim- 

 portant anatomical investigations are enu- 

 merated, does not devote a single word to this 

 work, which forms an epoch in science/' 



But history has reversed the scales and 

 posterity has repaired the wrong. That theory 

 of biological evolution, which was despised 

 and rejected by the builders of his day has 

 become the corner-stone of modern knowledge, 

 while Cuvier's fantastic "Theory of the Earth'' 

 has gone to the museum of curiosities. 



Lamarck's immortality is secured by his 

 assertion and defense of the theory of descent, 

 alone. This theory is, that all existing species 

 have descended from ancestors who were in a 

 vast number of cases, and ultimately in all, 

 very different from their present representa- 

 tives; that this difference is due, not to the 

 total extinction of the previous species by 

 "cataclysms," and the divine creation of new 

 ones, as Cuvier maintained, but because 



