l6o LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



hand independent of prejudices even the most wide- 

 spread, and on the other profound observers of nature, 

 may have a gUmpse of this truth, I am very content 

 that we should know that it is of the number of those 

 views which, in spite of the prejudices of my age, 

 I have thought it well to accept." 



"Why," he asks, "should not heat and electricity 

 act on certain matters under favorable conditions and 

 circumstances ? " He quotes Lavoisier as saying 

 {Chdmie, i., p. 202) " that God in creating light had 

 spread over the world the principle of organization 

 of feeling and of thought " ; and Lamarck suggests 

 that hfeat, " this mother of generation, this material 

 soul of organized bodies," may be the chief one of 

 the means which nature directly employs to produce 

 in the appropriate kind of matter an act of arrange- 

 ment of parts, of a primitive germ of organization, 

 and consequently of vitalization analogous to sexual 

 fecundation. 



" Not only the direct formation of the simplest 

 living beings could have taken place, as I shall at- 

 tempt to demonstrate, but the following considera- 

 tions prove that it is necessary that such germ-forma- 

 tions should be effected and be repeated under 

 favorable conditions, without which the state of 

 things which we observe could neither exist nor 

 subsist." 



His argument is that in the lower polyps (the 

 Protozoa) there is no sexual reproduction, no eggs. 

 But they perish (as he strangely thought, without 

 apparently attempting to verify his belief) in the 

 winter. How, he asks, can they reappear ? Is it not 



