228 LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



tion as to the reason from his own pen, we are led 

 to suppose that his studies on the invertebrates, his 

 perception of the gradations in the animal scale from 

 monad to man, together with his inherent propensity 

 to inquire into the origin of things, also his studies on 

 fossils, as well as the broadening nature of his zoologi- 

 cal investigations and his meditations during the 

 closing years of the eighteenth century, must grad- 

 ually have led to a change of views. 



It was said by Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire that 

 Lamarck was " long a partisan of the immutability of 



_ .O , ST -.^11 II— 1 III -^"^ 



species," * but the use ot the word " partisan " appears 

 to be quite incorrect, as he only in one instance ex- 

 presses such views. / 



The only place where we iiave seen any statement 

 of Lamarck's earlier opinions is in his Recherches sur 

 les Causes des principaux Faits physiques, which was 

 written, as the "advertisement" states, "about eigh- 

 teen years " before its publication in 1704. The 

 treatise was actually presented April 22, ij78p, to the 

 Academic des Sciences.f It will be seen by the fol- 

 lowing passages, which we translate, that, as Huxley 

 states, this view presents a striking contrast to those 

 to be found in the Philosophic zoologique : 



" 685. Although my sole object in this article 

 [article premier, p. 188] has only been to treat of the 



* Butler's JSvolation, Old and Mezo (p. 244), and Isidore Geoffroy 

 St. Hilaire's Histoire naturelle g/n^rale, tome ii. , p. 404 (1859). 



f After looking in vain through both volumes of the Recherches for 

 some expression of Lamarck's earlier views, I found a mention of it 

 in Osborn's From the Greeks to Darwin, p. 152, and reference to 

 Huxley's Evolution in Biology, 1878 (" Darwiniana," p. 2lo), where 

 the paragraphs translated above are quoted in the original. 



