[Annals N. Y. Acad. Sci., Vol. XIX, No. 10, Part II, pp. 225-245, IS March, 1910.] 
THE FOUNDER OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 
By Charles Finney Cox. 
Presidential Address, read at the Annual Meeting of the New York Academy of 
Sciences, December 20, 1909. 
On the thirteenth of last June, I had the pleasure of attending the cere¬ 
monies connected with the dedication of a noble statue of the Chevalier 
de Lamarck, in the Jardins des Plantes, in Paris. The monument could 
not have been placed over the remains of the great naturalist, since no one 
knows his last resting-place. Still better, however, it was erected at the 
principal entrance to the botanical garden within which he lived and labored 
during the greater paid of his long and well-filled life and where most of his 
descriptive and philosophical writing was done. There, before the ap¬ 
plauding multitude, the humble student of nature, whom the artist has ably 
and faithfully portrayed, was acclaimed by the highest officers of state and 
by distinguished men of science with lofty and unstinted eulogium. 
This formal recognition of Lamarck’s eminence in the world of science 
and of his importance in the realm of systematic thought came a little tardily, 
perhaps, in the eightieth year after his death, but it was interesting and 
suggestive that this commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the 
publication of his most important work should have fallen in the very 
month when men of learning from almost every civilized country on the 
globe were journeying to Cambridge to celebrate the centenary of the birth, 
and the fiftieth anniversary of the issuance of the epoch-making book, of 
that other great naturalist and philosopher whose name has been, since 
1859, most often coupled with Lamarck’s. This unique occasion inevitably 
brought to mind, with peculiar significance, a comparison of the views and 
theories of these two representative evolutionists, especially to those who, 
like myself, expected to turn from the flowery paths so long frequented by 
Lamarck to the stately halls and peaceful “quads” familiar to the college 
days of Darwin. As a good Darwinian, I was glad of the privilege of paying 
my silent tribute of respect to the famous author of the “Philosophic Zoolo- 
gique,” but, in view of the later object of my pilgrimage, I was not in a 
mood to yield, out of mere courtesy and momentary enthusiasm, any of my 
long cherished loyalty to the writer of “The Origin of Species.” It was, 
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