246 THE FOUNDATIONS OF ZOOLOGY 



esis had been sadly damaged by its supporters," says Huxley, who 

 " had studied Lamarck attentively," but had found no ground for 

 changing his negative and critical attitude. 



In 1849 Darwin said of Lamarck, "his absurd though clever 

 work has done the subject harm " ; and I have quoted (p. 82) ex- 

 tracts from works written about the time the "Origin " was published, 

 by naturalists who saw clearly that nurture can have no practical 

 share in the origin of species unless it has a determinate influence in 

 beneficial lines ; nor are matters helped at all by attributing this 

 determinate beneficial influence to a necessary law of universal prog- 

 ress ; for natural laws are not rulers or governors over nature, but 

 generalizations from an experience which seems to teach, among 

 other things, that progress is neither necessary nor universal. 



" If all organic beings thus tend to rise in the scale, how is it that 

 throughout the world a multitude of the lowest forms still exist ; and 

 how is it that in each great class some forms are far more highly 

 developed than others } Why have not the more highly devel- 

 oped forms everywhere supplanted and exterminated the lower.' 

 Lamarck, who believed in an innate and inevitable tendency towards 

 perfection in all organic beings, seems to have felt this difficulty so 

 strongly, that he was led to suppose that new and simple forms are 

 continually being produced by spontaneous generation. Science has 

 not yet proved the truth of this belief, whatever the future may 

 reveal. On my theory the continued existence of lowly organisms 

 offers no difficulty ; for natural selection, or the survival of the 

 fittest, does not necessarily include progressive development, — it 

 only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to 

 each creature under its complex relations of life." ^ 



Even if it were shown that the sum of the conditions that make 

 up the environment of organisms does, in the long run, make for 

 fitness, the problem of the naturalist is not the existence of adapta- 

 tions as such, but the existence of adaptive species ; and if the 

 fitness of the living world as a whole were to be explained by a 

 general law of evolution, this would not tell us why we do not find 

 innumerable transitional forms, living side by side with the actual 

 species, and filling all the gaps between them. 



While events in general take place, no doubt, according to the 



1 " Origin," p. 98. 



