238 
ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 
it fully attained to the ability to secure its new food supply. Professor Hux¬ 
ley, moved by the same impulse, asks “how long an animal is likely to en¬ 
deavour to gratify an impossible desire,” and concludes that “the bird, in 
our example, would surely have renounced fish dinners long before it had 
produced the least effect on leg or neck.” 1 As to the polar-bear case, I trust 
it will not be taken as typical of Darwin’s conception of the mode of origin 
of adapted forms in the evolution of new species. I have quoted it for the 
purpose of giving Lamarck full credit for whatever influence he may have 
exerted upon Darwin’s earlier views, but in justice to Darwin we must re¬ 
member that he never again conceded so much importance to the effects of 
mere effort in the modification of organs under the stimulus of novel condi¬ 
tions of life. If he had rewritten the description of Hearne’s bear we may 
be sure that he would have ascribed quite different degrees of importance to 
the selection of food by an unadapted animal to suit its own tastes or desires 
and the selection of an adapted animal itself, through the forces of nature, 
to meet the requirements of a new state of the environment. 
Lamarckians are apt to feel displeased when Darwinians affirm that 
Lamarck believed that animals developed organs by merely wishing for them, 
but in respect to both the wading bird and the giraffe it comes practically 
to the same result, if the giraffe acquired its elongated neck and the bird 
attained to stilt-like legs through wishing for food which was previously 
out of reach. What we may with fairness call Darwin’s giraffe, having a 
normally long neck, or one normally inclined to become long, was prepared 
before-hand for any diminution that might occur in the supply of low- 
growing fodder, and its survival, after such diminution had set in or become 
severe, is therefore easily accounted for. We may assume that it simply ap¬ 
plied its extraordinary length of neck to the purpose to which it was already 
fitted, and thus by cropping higher and higher foliage it easily acquired a 
monopoly of that kind of food and consequently triumphed over its short¬ 
necked companions. But what we may distinguish as Lamarck’s giraffe is 
not supposed to have been endowed with a long neck in advance of any 
absolute need for such an organ, and we may therefore imagine that, when 
herbage began to give out, the animal must have been taken by surprise and 
that its circumstances must have been — as Professor Huxley has intimated 
that they were in the instance of the wading bird — decidedly uncomfortable 
and threatening unless, perchance, like the wind that is said to be tempered 
to the shorn lamb, the disappearance of the herbage was somehow graduated 
exactly to match the development of the giraffe’s ability to add to the length 
of its cervical vertebrae. In the case of the Lamarckian giraffe, there could 
1 Essay on “The Darwinian Hypothesis,” in “Darwiniana,” p. 13. 1902. 
