1914- 
Reviews. 
Vertebrata with Invcrtebrata, who reduced the Mollusca to a natural 
assemblage, who separated the Crustacea and the Arachnida from the 
Insecta, was undoubtedly a very great naturalist. It is further note- 
worth}'' that, in his evolutionary speculations he began, like Aristotle, 
by arranging species and larger systematic groups in linear series, and 
arrived later at the conception of what we now call a " phylogenetic 
tree " with " at least two separate branches," each of which " appears 
to terminate in several twigs," 
I>amarck's writings have been so frequently quoted and interpreted 
by modern naturalists engaged in controversy for or against his leading 
theory of " use inheritance," that it is good for the student to go to 
Lamarck's most famous book and find exactly what he did write in its 
original connection. Of course it will not be forgotten that Lamarck's 
theory in its final and more elaborated form — the " four laws " — is set 
forth in his later " Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertebres 
(1815-22). But in the " Philosophic Zoologique " he ranges over the 
whole world of living nature as he was able to conceive it, and we can 
appreciate both the strength and weakness of his work for evolutionary 
biology. His acceptance of " spontaneous generation " was almost 
inevitable in the early nineteenth century, but his unwillingness to believe 
that any species of animal had ever become extinct except those 
extcrmmated b}^ human agency is hard to understand. When we consider 
that the " Origin of Species " — nearer in time to the " Philosophie 
Zoologique " than to our day by fourteen years — is in its spirit nearer 
to us than the latter by a century, we understand to some extent why 
Lamarck failed to convince men generally of the truth of evolution and 
why Darwin succeeded. 
Mr. Elliot has spared no pains in giving to the English reader a 
translation which, while it retains as much as possible the flavour of the 
lucid yet somewhat ponderous original, is intelligible in its nomenclature 
to the naturalist of the present day, terms like " generation " and 
" distribution " being translated by their modern equivalents and not 
by the words which an English contemporary of Lamarck might have 
used. Further Mr. Elliot furnishes the reader of his translation with 
the temptation not to read Lamarck after all, by prefacing the actual 
work with an incisively written critical summary. In this he shows the 
weakness of the use -inheritance theory, while at the same time he 
impartially discounts the dogmatism of the extreme followers of 
Weismann. The chapters on the physiological and psychological sections 
of Lamarck's work are trenchantly " anti-vitalistic," as might be expected 
from Mr. Elliot's recent controversial writings on these subjects. Here 
the violence of some of the statements will defeat the translator's ends. 
That " spirits . . . survive only in extremely mitigated form in the 
imaginations of the vulgar " is simply an untrue statement, and it is 
hard to imagine that Mr. Elliot really believes it. And the autumn of 
19 14 is an unfortunate time at which to sing the praise of " the rise of 
materialism in conjunction with the advance of civilization." 
G. H. C. 
