60 EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC 



where the earth, almost always arid and 

 destitute of herbage, obliges it to browse on 

 the foliage of trees and to make continual 

 efforts to reach it. It has resulted from this 

 habit, maintained for a long period in all the 

 individuals of its race, that its forelegs have 

 become longer than the hinder ones, and that 

 its neck is so elongated that the giraffe, with- 

 out standing on its hind legs, raises its head 

 and reaches six meters in height (almost 

 twenty feet). 



Lamarck thought this length of neck was 

 acquired by "continual efforts to reach,'' or, 

 as Alfred Russell Wallace puts it in his critic- 

 ism of Lamarck — "stretching." Many critics 

 ventilated their wit on this theory of La- 

 marck's, under the impression that they were 

 lampooning Darwin's idea. 



They made a blunder similar to that of those 

 critics of Utopian Socialism who labor under 

 the pleasing delusion that they are riddling 

 the theories of Marx. Professor Ritchie has 

 preseived a couple of stanza's by a witty 

 Scotch judge who aimed his poem at Darwin, 

 but hit Lamarck. 



"A deer with a neck that was longer by half 

 Than the rest of his family, try not to laugh, 

 By stretching and stretching became a giraffe 

 Which nobody can deny. 



