1 62 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



This is certainly a sufficiently vague and unsatisfac- 

 tory theory of spontaneous generation. This sort of 

 guess-york and hypothetical reasoning is not entirely 

 confined to Lamarck's time. Have we not, even a 

 century later, examples among some of our biologists, 

 and very eminent ones, of whole volumes of ti priori 

 theorizing and reasoning, with scarcely a single new 

 fact to serve as a foundation ? And yet this is an 

 age of laboratories, of experimentations and of trained 

 observers. The best of us indulge in far-fetched 

 hypotheses, such as pangenesis, panmixia, the exist- 

 ence of determinants, and if this be so should we not 

 excuse Lamarck, who gave so many years to close 

 observation in systematic botany and zoology, for 

 his flights into the empyrean of subtle fluids, con- 

 tainable and uncontainable, and for his invocation of 

 an aura vitalis, at a time when the world of demon- 

 strated facts in modern biology was undiscovered and 

 its existence unsuspected ? 



The Pre'existence of Germs and the Encasement 

 Theory. — Lamarck did not believe in Bonnet's idea 

 of the " preexistence .of germs." He asks whether 

 there is any foundation for the notion that germs 

 " successively develop in generations, i.e. in the mul- 

 tiplication of individuals for the preservation of 

 species," and says : 



" I am not inclined to believe it if this preexistence 

 is taken in a general sense ; but in limiting it to in- 

 dividuals in which the unfertilized embryos or germs 

 are formed before generation, I then believe that it 

 has some foundation. — They say with good reason," 

 he adds, " that every living being originates from 



