1 8 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND IVORK 



mais seulement des individus ? "* In his Discours sur 

 I' Indgalit^ parmi les Homines is the following passage, 

 which shows, as Giard says, that Rousseau perfectly- 

 understood the influence of the milieu and of wants 

 on the organism ; and this brilliant writer seems to 

 have been the first to suggest natural selection, though 

 only in the case of man, when he says that the weaker 

 in Sparta were eliminated in order that the superior 

 and stronger of the race might survive and be main- 

 tained. 



" Accustomed from infancy to the severity of the 

 weather and the rigors of the seasons, trained to 

 undergo fatigue, and obliged to defend naked and 

 without arms their life and their prey against ferocious 

 beasts, or to escape them by flight, the men acquired 

 an almost invariably robust temperament ; the infants, 

 bringing into the world the strong constitution of 

 their fathers, and strengthening themselves by the 

 same kind of exercise as produced it, have thus ac- 

 quired all the vigor of which the human species is 

 capable. Nature uses them precisely as did the law 

 of Sparta the children of her citizens. She rendered 

 strong and robust those with a good constitution, and 

 destroyed all the others. Our societies differ in this 

 respect, where the state, in rendering the children 

 burdensome to the father, indirectly kills them be- 

 fore birth. "f 



Soon Lamarck abandoned not only a military 

 career, but also music, medicine, and the bank, and 

 devoted himself exclusively to science. He was now 

 twenty-four years old, and, becoming a student of 



* Dictionnaire des Termes de la Botanique. Art. Aphrodite. 

 \ Discoars sur I'Originc et les Fondements de V In^gahti parmi 

 les Honimes. 1754. 



