12 GENESIS OF MAN. 



The dim intimations and scattered glimpses of Goethe and cri 

 Dr. Darwin were insignificant in comparison with the lucid illus- 

 trations and systematic arguments of the great French naturalist. 

 After so many years of assiduous study Lamarck, as it were, but 

 copied his conclusions from the pages of nature where facts stood 

 forth like letters in a book. Yet none the less credit to his intel- 

 lect, for was not this same book sealed to his great contem- 

 porary, Cuvier, who knew its alphabet equally well ? And is it not 

 sealed to many to-day ? The truth is that for the first time the 

 causal and essentially rational type of mind had been joined in the 

 same individual with those other qualities which impel to the pa- 

 tient investigation of facts and details; rare combination, so success- 

 fully repeated in the intellectual constitutions of Charles Darwin 

 and Ernst Haeckel. 



When we compare, from our disinterested standpoint in America, 

 the great chef d' ceuvre of Jean Lamarck, its systematic execution, 

 its definite, avowed purpose, and its vast array of proofs from the 

 only legitimate source of argument, with the various writings of 

 Goethe containing his views on this subject, arranged with no sys- 

 tematic order, having no well defined purpose, evincing no clear 

 conception of nature's means or methods, and manifesting a com- 

 paratively scanty acquaintance with particular cases by which the 

 laws under discussion are to be illustrated, we cannot fail to per- 

 ceive, in the circumstance of Haeckel's placing his own country- 

 man before the son of a rival nation, in his estimate of the relative 

 labors of the two pioneers of evolution, a trace of that almost 

 inevitable national bias which lurks in regions of the brain inac- 

 cessible to the invasion even of exact science. The essential 

 incongruity between the first and last parts of the following passage 

 will be apparent to all. " At the head of the French natural 

 philosophy stands Jean Lamarck, who, in the history of the doc- 

 trine of descent, next to Darwin and Goethe, occupies the first place. 

 To him will remain the immortal glory of having for the first time 

 brought forward the theory of descent as an independent scientific 

 theory and established it as the natural philosophical foundation 

 of all biology." He certainly ascribes to Goethe no such " im- 

 mortal glory" as this. 



There is but one distinct element in Darwinism that is not also 

 found in Lamarckism. This is the important recognition of the 



