THE GERM-PLASM THEORY 67 



personification, attained the powers by which 

 these mighty works have been done. 



It would be a hopeless task to attempt to enter 

 into any account of all the points dealt with in 

 these two large volumes. Nor is that task necessary, 

 for large portions of them are occupied with an 

 account a most interesting account of the main 

 lines of the transformist theory, lines with which 

 all educated persons are familiar. It will serve our 

 purpose if we follow out one line of argument, 

 that touching the influence of the environment 

 on the individual and his progeny ; for in follow- 

 ing out that line we shall be brought in contact 

 with the main features of Weismann's teaching, 

 features with which no person interested in the 

 progress of science at the present day can afford 

 not to be acquainted. 



Jean Baptiste de Lamarck was born in 1744 in 

 a village in Picardy. He made a considerable repu- 

 tation by his Flora of France, and merits a niche 

 in the temple of science as the founder of the 

 category of " vertebrates." For neither of these 

 reasons, however, is his name now familiar, but 

 for the fact that he was the author of the Philo- 

 sophie Zoologique, a work which, oddly enough, 

 appeared in 1809, the very year in which Charles 

 Darwin saw the light. In this work one of the 

 pre-Darwinian expositions of the doctrine of 

 transformation Lamarck taught that any great 

 alteration in the conditions of life, if sufficiently 

 prolonged, would cause a change in the needs of 

 living things affected by them, and that this in 

 time would cause them to adopt new habits. But 



