no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It has been more the fashion to condemn Lamarck for his specu- 

 lations than to give him the credit that is his due for his great work in 

 classification. Recently, however, two naturalists have endeavored to 

 present these speculations in a more favorable light, and, without de- 

 nying that they embodied much that was not well enough established, 

 to show that much in them was only anticipatory of what science has 

 since accepted : Herr Haeckel, in Germany, who declares that in Dar- 

 win, Goethe, and Lamarck, " each of the three great civilized nations 

 of middle Europe has presented mankind in the course of a hundred 

 years with an intellectual hero of the first rank, who comprehended in 

 its full significance the fundamental idea of the concordant develop- 

 ment of the world from natural causes " ; and M. Barth^lemy, in 

 France, who considers that Lamarck was a forerunner of Darwin, and 

 a greater than he. 



M. Barthelemy, while admitting that Lamarck's theories on physics, 

 chemistry, and meteorology were frequently rash and lacking the pre- 

 cision that experiment gives, says : " He believed in natural laws, in 

 the unity and transformation of physical and physiological forces, be- 

 cause he attributed a special signification to nature. To him nature 

 was a power subordinate to God, its sublime author, who must not be 

 confounded with it, and whose function it is to put to work forces 

 and laws which it has not made, and can not modify. His cosmical 

 system is summarized in the three elements : God, nature, and the 

 universe. Transformism, with Lamarck, is not bom of abstract medi- 

 tations and a priori conceptions, as has sometimes been said. It is 

 connected with the whole of the theories that precede. He rose from 

 the careful study of the immense multitude of beings he had to ex- 

 amine to carry order and light into the chaos of invertebrate animals. 

 In his first lectures he began with the most rudimentary beings, the 

 origin of which he attributed to physico-chemical forces, and then saw 

 the organization and the circulation of the fluids become more com- 

 plicated and more perfect as the scale of being rose with new faculties 

 resulting from the acquisition of new organs derived from the cellular 

 tissue, and owing their origin to new wants or new circumstances in 

 which the being found itself placed. He conceived very clearly the 

 influence of external conditions, and attributed the modifications of 

 organisms to two factors, one interior and constant and regular in its 

 operation ; the other exterior and irregular, and including modifica- 

 tions of media, temperature, nutrition, etc. He concluded from 

 this that a continuous chain of beings is not possible, for, if such 

 a chain existed, it would quickly be broken by the accidental or 

 irregular circumstances to which beings are obliged to adapt them- 

 selves." 



Herr Haeckel pronounces Lamarck's " Philosophic Zoologique," in 

 respect to its uniform and complete deduction of the development 

 theory, as well as to its many-sided empirical basis, far more impor- 



