310 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



the fixity and independence of species. And it is equally 

 interesting to mark the causes which militated against 

 the more general acceptance of his views, and which 

 cast the ' Philosophic Zoologique ' into oblivion. To the 

 first question Lamarck has himself, in the introduction l 

 to his great work, furnished us with the means of reply- 

 ing. He there tells us that when the real study of 

 natural history began, and each of the different king- 

 doms of nature received the due attention of naturalists, 

 animals with a backbone viz., mammalia, birds, reptiles, 

 and fishes received the greater attention. 2 Being in 

 general larger, with parts more developed and more 

 easily determinable, they, as it were, obtruded them- 

 selves on the attention of man, for whom they are both 

 more useful and more formidable. The other large group 

 of animals, classed together first by Lamarck himself as 

 " Invertebrates," are mostly very small, with organs and 

 faculties less developed, and thus much further removed 

 from man and his interests. Of this by far more numer- 

 ous class of beings, those called insects had alone at the 

 end of the former century received considerable atten- 

 tion, whereas all the others, classed together by linmeus 

 as " worms," formed a kind of chaos, an unknown land, 



1 Lamarck's later genetic views taining the " pieces justificatives 



are contained in the ' Philosophic de ce que j'ai publie dans ma 



Zoologique,' which appeared in Philosophic Zoologique." This great, 



1809, and was republished with a work was republished in 1837 by 



biographical notice by Charles Deshayes and Milne - Edwards. I 



Martin in 1873. I quote from this quote from this edition, which is 



edition. His principal ideas are also in three volumes, 



summarised in the introduction to - See ' Philosophic Zoologique,' 



his great work, ' Histoire des Discours preliminaire, vol. i. p. 29 ; 



Animaux sans Vertebras' (1816), also 'Animaux sans Vertebres,' 



which in fact he represents as con- Introduction, vol. i. p. 11. 



