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ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
that this uncertainty of expression was an intentional concession to the 
theological bias of his time. 
Upon examining Lamarck’s four laws and their context it does not appear 
that he offered any really characteristic or original addition to the ancient 
philosophy of progressive development except the idea contained in the 
second law that “the production of a new organ in an animal body results 
from the supervention of a new want”; but even if he had succeeded in 
proving that when an organ is needed it will forthwith make its appearance 
or be brought into existence by a new movement which the want gives 
rise to, he would not have done much towards simplifying the problem of 
evolution, for he would have given us no reason why every form that has 
ever existed was not fitted to leave an unbroken line of descendants. The 
feeling that Lamarck’s attempted explanation of the origin of organization 
did not really explain is the most powerful reason why his whole philosophy 
has been rejected by the great mass of scientific workers and thinkers. His 
first law, as to the cause and the limitation of growth, and his third, as to the 
effect of use upon the development of organs, state facts so obvious and so 
long understood that they amount to little more than truisms. His fourth 
law, referring to what is commonly called the inheritance of acquired char¬ 
acters, like his second law, is generally discredited by working naturalists, 
but I confess I am not quite able to appreciate the ground of its unquali¬ 
fied rejection. But since it actually is discredited, together with the only 
other law that was distinctly Lamarckian, I can not help asking once more 
for the foundation of the evolution theory which is said to have been laid 
by Lamarck. 
Lamarck, of course, believed in the transformation of species, in some 
form, as he was obliged to do as a professed evolutionist, although Darwin, 
with unusual bluntness, spoke of his views on mutability as “veritable rub¬ 
bish.” 1 But like other evolutionists Lamarck needed to account for the 
transmission of variational effects, and it seems to me he was at least logical 
in deeming his fourth law a necessary part of his system, although I think he 
might better have made it a little less absolute than it is made by the state¬ 
ment that “everything which has been acquired” is transmitted. Darwin 
followed Lamarck in his general idea of the inheritance of acquired char¬ 
acters, and I do not see how he could well have avoided doing so, for, with 
Lamarck, he appears to have thought that if any organic form is like a 
parent but unlike any grandparent, it has inherited something that was 
acquired by the parent. Parenthetically, I wish to remark, that I doubt 
whether in his fourth law, Lamarck used the word “acquired” in any such 
narrow sense as that given to it by controversialists of the present day. It is 
1 “ Life and Letters,” Vol. II, p. 29. 1887. 
