114 EVOLUTIONISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



idea. By this assumption of the investment of non- 

 living matter with the properties of Hving matter, 

 he was in a position to readily derive the latter from 

 the former, and to directly unite the animate and 

 inanimate worlds. He does not enter into detail 

 as to the origin of life, but carries us a step further 

 in his ideas of heredity, somewhat on the lines of 

 Democritus, and of Buffon, who had published his 

 similar ' theory of generation ' five years earlier 

 (1746). 



"The elementary particles which form the embryo are each 

 drawn from the corresponding structure in the parent, and con- 

 serve a sort of recollection {soiivejiir) of their previous form, 

 so that in the offspring they will reflect and reproduce a resem- 

 blance to the parents. ... If some of the particles happen to 

 be missing, an imperfect being is formed ... if the elements of 

 the different species are united, a hybrid is produced. ... In 

 some cases a child resembles one of his ancestors more than even 

 its parents ; in this case we may suppose that the material particles 

 conserve more strongly the habits they possessed in the ancestral 

 form." 



Maupertuis thus gives us a theory which resembles 

 both the ' Pangenesis ' of Darwin and the ' Peri- 

 genesis' of Haeckel.^ 



These principles of reproduction and heredity 

 enable Maupertuis to explain readily the origin of 

 new species, and here again w^e find a striking an- 

 ticipation of one modern doctrine of the cause of 



1 In Haeckel's " Perigenesis of the plastidules," we have a theory of hered- 

 ity based upon the assumption that the material hereditary particles preserve 

 a power of repetition of former states analogous to that witnessed in memory. 



