NEOLAMARCKISM 



397 



has for its foundation a combination of the factors 

 suggested by the Buffon and Geoffroy St. Hilaire 

 school, which insisted on the direct action of the 

 milieu, and of Lamarck, who rehed both on the di- 

 rect (plants and lowest animals) and on the indirect 

 action of the environment, adding the important 

 factors of need and of change of habits resulting 

 either in the atrophy or in the development of 

 organs by disuse or use, with the addition of the 

 hereditary transmission of characters acquired in the 

 lifetime of the individual. 



" Lamarck's views, owing to the early date of his 

 work, which was published in 1809, before the foun- 

 dation of the sciences of embryology, cytology, 

 palaeontology, zoogeography, and in short all that 

 distinguishes modern biology, were necessarily some- 

 what crude, though the fundamental factors he sug- 

 gested are those still invoked by all thinkers of 

 Lamarckian tendencies. 



on the organism, resulting at times in a new genus, or even a family 

 type. Natural selection, acting through thousands, and sometimes 

 millions, of generations of animals and plants, often operates too 

 slowly ; there are gaps which have been, so to speak, intentionally 

 left by Nature. Moreover, natural selection was, as used by some 

 writers, more an idea than a vera causa. Natural selection also 

 begins with the assumption of a tendency to variation, and presup- 

 poses a world already tenanted by vast numbers of animals among 

 which a struggle for existence was going on, and the few were vic- 

 torious over the many. But the entire inadequacy of Darwinism to 

 account for the primitive origin of life forms, for the original diversity 

 in the different branches of the tree of life forms, the interdependence 

 of the creation of ancient faunas and floras on geological revolutions, 

 and consequent sudden changes in the environment of organisms, has 

 convinced us that Darwinism is but one of a number of factors of a 

 true evolution theory ; that it comes in play only as the last term of 

 a series of evolutionary agencies or causes ; and that it rather ac- 

 counts, as first suggested by the Duke of Argyll, for Xhi. preservation 

 of forms than for their origination. We may, in fact, compare Dar- 

 winism to the apex of a pyramid, the larger mass of the pyramid 

 representing the complex of theories necessary to account for the 

 world of life as it has been and now is. In other words, we believe 

 in a modified and greatly extended Lamarckianism, or what may be 

 called Neo-Lamarckianism." 



