EXPERIMENTAL EVOLUTION LECT. 



plete account of the progress of the Evolution theory- 

 more especially after having announced our desire to 

 restrict ourselves chiefly to French naturalists and 

 shall dwell no longer on this point of history. It 

 must be recalled, however, that Linnaeus, in 1762 

 (Amcenitates] had expressed the idea that all species 

 of the same genus ab initio unam constituerunt speciem, 

 without saying, however, how the differentiation of 

 he primitive one species into many had taken place. 

 Moreover many writers whose names are given by 

 Darwin in his Origin of Species, anticipated him more 

 or less, not in his explanation of the quomodo of trans- 

 mutation, but in the statement of the fact, or theory. 



There is, however, one name to which attention 

 must be called ; it is that of Naudin, the veteran French 

 botanist, who, in 1852, published a very interesting 

 paper in the Revue Horticole (1852, p. 102). As he 

 recently wrote to me x this paper was published 

 by the editors of the Revue with much diffidence ; 

 they cared little about theoretical discussions, and the 

 hypothesis of transmutation was " nowhere " in their 

 opinion. Some passages are of much interest, and 

 may be quoted here. 



1 " The editors of the Revue Horticole did not feel inclined to 

 allow such heretical notions to be expounded in it ; they accepted the 

 paper, however, throwing the whole responsibility upon myself, and 

 fearing to injure their orthodoxy through an irhpure alloy." (Letter, 

 dated March 6th, 1891.) 



