CHAPTER II 



CONTRIBUTIONS OF LAMARCK, WEISMANN, AND HERBERT 

 SPENCER TO THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION; DARWIN'S 



THEORY OF PANGENESIS 



Lamarck (1744-1829), the greatest evolutionist before Dar- 

 win, was, according to his biographer, a man of great physical 

 and moral courage. He distinguished himself by a deed of 

 singular bravery in the French army, and, receiving an in- 

 jury, re-entered life as a doctor. He was first attracted to 

 botany by the rich flora near Monaco observed during his 

 military service. Going to Paris he gained the attention of 

 the great naturalist, Buff on, under whose direction he pub- 

 lished a " Flora of France," written in six months, which 

 passed through many editions. He seems to have possessed 

 powers of exceptionally rapid observation, with great facility 

 in writing and with unusual powers of definition and descrip- 

 tion. At the age of forty-nine (1793) he was transferred to a 

 Zoological chair in the Jardins des Plantes, being placed in 

 charge of invertebrate zoology, while at the same time Geoff- 

 roy Saint-Hilaire was placed in charge of vertebrate zoology. 

 Being at this time in his fiftieth year, Lamarck took up the 

 study of zoology with such zeal and success that he almost 

 immediately introduced striking reforms in classification, and 

 developed (after having reached middle life) the conception 

 of the mutability of species and of the origin of new species 

 by descent. His relation to the evolution idea was thus very 

 different from Darwin's. It came to Darwin almost in his 

 boyhood and he spent a lifetime working it out, not publishing 

 anything upon it until he was fifty years old. To Lamarck 

 the idea seems scarcely to have come before the age of fifty, 

 and he rapidly developed it into a system, sufficiently elabor- 

 ate to explain evolution, if his basic principle is true, viz. 



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