384 



LAMARCK, HIS LIFE AND WORK 



or its modern form, Neolamarckism. Lamarck had 

 already, so far as he could without a knowledge of 

 modern morphology, embryology, cytology, and his- 

 tology, suggested those fundamental principles of 

 transformism on which rests the selective principle. 



Had his works been more accessible, or, where avail- 

 able, more carefully read, and his views more fairly 

 represented ; had he been favored in his lifetime by 

 a single supporter, rather than been unjustly criti- 

 cised by Cuvier, science would have made more rapid 

 progress, for it is an axiomatic truth that the general 

 acceptance of a working evolutionary theory has 

 given a vast impetus to biology. 



We will now give a brief historical summary of the 

 history of opinion held by Lamarckians regarding the 

 causes of the " origin of the fittest," the rise of varia- 

 tions, and the appearance of a population of plant 

 and animal forms sufficiently extensive and differ- 

 entiated to allow for the play of the competitive 

 forces, and of the more passive selective agencies 

 which began to operate in pre-cambrian times, or as 

 soon as the earth became fitted for the existence of 

 living beings. 



The first writer after Lamarck to work along the 

 lines he laid down was Mr. Herbert Spencer. In 

 1866-71, in his epochal and remarkably suggestive 

 Principles of Biology, the doctrine of use and disuse 

 is implicated in his statements as to the effects of 

 motion on structure in general ; * and in his theory as 

 to the origin of the notochord, and of the segmenta- 



*VoI. ii., p. 167, 1S71. 



