DEVELOPMENT THEORY. 



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now see, so admirably adapted, each to the kind of life which 

 it leads — provided, according to their necessities, with claws 

 or hoofs, wings or fins, sharp teeth or horny beaks — have 

 not always lived under this form ; that they have gradually 

 acquired these diverse conformations, which are at present in 

 perfect harmony with the conditions under which they live. 

 But, when we ask him to show us a modification of this kind 

 in process of accomplishment under an external influence, the 

 author of the ^^Philosophic Zoologique'* has little wherewith 

 to furnish us, except modifications of slight importance ; he 

 objects that scientific observation does not go far enough back 

 into the ages of the world. If we open the tombs of Mem- 

 phis and show Lamarck the skeletons of animals identical 

 with those which live in Egypt at the present day, he replies 

 without being disconcerted: '^It is because these animals 

 lived under the same conditions as those which exist at the 

 present time.'* The answer is as good as the attack, but 

 proves nothing. We might carry on the discussion for ever 

 ou such grounds as these. 



Darwin is more precise when he pleads in favour of natural 

 selection. There is no one at the present time who does not 

 admit the enormous power of selection in modifying the type 

 of organized beings. Breeders have produced the most 

 curious transformations in the animal kingdom, by choosing 

 continually for the purpose of reproduction, individuals pos- 

 sessing in a high degree the physical characteristics which 

 they desire to impress on the race. Selection produces in the 

 vegetable kingdom transformations of a similar kind ; so that 

 Darwin has, without giving way too much to hypothesis, 

 attributed the principal part in transformation to a selection 

 which is made naturally, for the reasons that have just been 

 given. But Darwin, as well as Lamarck, only considers under 

 a restricted point of view the causes of the transformation of 

 organized beings. Each of the two chiefs of this doctrine 

 gives the greatest prominence to the cause of variation which 

 he first has pointed out. 



The new school which, by a judicious eclecticism, endea- 

 vours to make a due partition between 'these two kinds of 

 influences, in order to explain by successive transformations 

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