

THE CENTURY'S PROGRESS IX BIOLOGY 



But most of the persons who advanced it would have 

 turned from it aghast could they have realized its im- 

 port. As it was, however, only here and there a man 

 like Buffon reasoned far enough to inquire what might 

 be the limits of such assumed transmutation ; and only 

 here and there a Darwin or a Goethe reached the con- 

 viction that there are no limits. 



ii 



And even Goethe and Darwin had scarcely passed be- 

 yond that tentative stage of conviction in which they 

 held the thought of transmutation of species as an ancil- 

 lary belief, not yet ready for full exposition There 

 was one of their contemporaries, however, who, holding 

 the same conception, was moved to give it full explica- 

 tion. This was the friend and disciple of Buffon, Jean 

 Baptiste de Lamarck. Possessed of the spirit of a poet 

 and philosopher, this great French man had also the widest 

 range of technical knowledge, covering the entire field 

 of animate nature. The first half of his long life was 

 devoted chiefly to botany, in which he attained high 

 distinction. Then, just at the beginning of our cen- 

 tury, he turned to zoology, in particular to the lower 

 forms of animal life. Studying these lowly organisms, 

 existing and fossil, he was more and more impressed 

 with the gradations of form everywhere to be seen ; 

 the linking of diverse families through intermediate 

 ones ; and in particular with the predominance of low 

 types of life in the earlier geological strata. Called upon 

 constantly to classify the various forms of life in the 

 course of his systematic writings, he found it more and 

 more difficult to draw sharp lines of demarcation, and at 



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