8 Darwin's Predecessors 
ment of the history of mankind, that all warm-blooded animals have 
arisen from one living filament?”....“ This idea of the gradual genera- 
tion of all things seems to have been as familiar to the ancient 
philosophers as to the modern ones, and to have given rise to the 
beautiful hieroglyphic figure of the mparov oor, or first great egg, 
produced by night, that is, whose origin is involved in obscurity, and 
animated by “Epes, that is, by Divine Love ; from whence proceeded 
all things which exist.” 
Lamarck (1744—1829) seems to have become an evolutionist inde- 
pendently of Erasmus Darwin's influence, though the parallelism 
between them is striking. He probably owed something to Buffon, 
but he developed his theory along a different line. Whatever view be 
held in regard to that theory there is no doubt that Lamarck was a 
thorough-going evolutionist. Professor Haeckel speaks of the Philo- 
sophie Zoologique as “the first connected and thoroughly logical 
exposition of the theory of descent’.” 
Besides the three old masters, as we may call them, Buffon, 
Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, there were other quite convinced 
pre-Darwinian evolutionists. The historian of the theory of descent 
must take account of Treviranus whose Biology or Philosophy 
of Animate Nature is full of evolutionary suggestions ; of Etienne 
Geoffroy St Hilaire, who in 1830, before the French Academy of 
Sciences, fought with Cuvier, the fellow-worker of his youth, an 
intellectual duel on the question of descent ; of Goethe, one of the 
founders of morphology and the greatest poet of Evolution—who, in his 
eighty-first year, heard the tidings of Geoffroy St Hilaire’s defeat with 
an interest which transcended the political anxieties of the time; and 
of many others who had gained with more or less confidence and 
clearness a new outlook on Nature. It will be remembered that 
Darwin refers to thirty-four more or less evolutionist authors in his 
Historical Sketch, and the list might be added to. Especially when 
we come near to 1858 do the numbers increase, and one of the most 
remarkable, as also most independent champions of the evolution- 
idea before that date was Herbert Spencer, who not only marshalled 
the arguments in a very forcible way in 1852, but applied the formula 
in detail in his Principles of Psychology in 18552. 
It is right and proper that we should shake ourselves free from 
all creationist appreciations of Darwin, and that we should recognise 
the services of pre-Darwinian evolutionists who helped to make the 
time ripe, yet one cannot help feeling that the citation of them is apt to 
suggest two fallacies. It may suggest that Darwin simply entered into 
1 See Alpheus S. Packard, Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution, His Life and Work, 
with Translations of his writings on Organic Evolution. London, 1901. 
2 See Edward Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution, London, p. 161, 1897. 
