COX ON THE FOUNDER OF THE EVOLUTION THEORY 229 
that his explanation was the correct one and that no considerable number 
of competent judges have pronounced in his favor from his day until this. 
If he had been fortunate enough to accomplish the object he had in view, 
he would have supplied the evolutionary process with a starting-place one 
step further back than the point at which Darwin was obliged to begin; 
for even the most thorough-going Darwinian must in justice admit that it is 
a fair criticism which has been often brought against Darwin’s philosophical 
scheme that, while it made much of the survival of the fittest, it offered no 
satisfactory clue to the origin of the fit. Although Darwin wrote an ex¬ 
tensive treatise on “The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestica¬ 
tion,” and included in “The Origin” a carefully composed chapter on the 
causes of variation in general, he never really convinced even himself as to 
how differences of form and function arose, but was obliged, after all, to 
assume their origin through the operation of some inscrutable law, availing, 
however, to some extent, of the influence of external conditions as an excitant 
to its action. On the other hand, Lamarck did not fully realize the extent 
and intensity of the struggle for existence and had little idea of the potency 
of selection; for, under his scheme, all positive variations must be useful 
from the beginning, since they arise solely in response to needs, and there 
is no necessary sifting out of good, better and best, except in the respect that 
whatever is not wanted retrogrades and disappears by the way it came. 
Lamarck’s four laws, as given in the introduction to his “Animaux sans 
Vertebres,” are as follows: 
“First: Life, by its proper forces, continually tends to increase the volume 
of every body which possesses it and to increase the size of its parts, up to a 
limit which it brings about. 
“Second: The production of a new organ in an animal body results from 
the supervention of a new want which continues to make itself felt, and of a 
new movement which this want gives rise to and maintains. 
“Third: The development of organs and their power of action are con¬ 
stantly in ratio to the employment of these organs. 
“Fourth: Everything which has been acquired, impressed upon, or 
changed in the organization of individuals during the course of their life is 
preserved by generation and transmitted to the new individuals which have 
descended from those which have undergone those changes.” 1 
I venture to think that these laws must sound archaic to any reader of the 
present day and that, as a whole, they appeal to the judgment of few workers 
in science of our time as an adequate evolutionary scheme. Compared with 
Darwin’s logical sequence of the six factors, Variation, Heredity, Over- 
1 Translation by A. S. Packard, in “Lamarck the Founder of Evolution,” p. 346. 1901. 
