Jeffries.] 
42 
[May 7, 
Dr. H. V. Wilson, Mr. J. A. Thompson, Mr. C. J. Maynard, 
Dr. Selah Merrill, Dr. Flagg, Mr. George F. Topliff and Mrs. C. 
H. Ramsay were elected Associate Members. 
The following papers were then read : — 
LAMARCKIAN ISM AND DARWINISM. 
BY DR. J. A. JEFFRIES. 
The theory of evolution of animals and plants, as expounded 
by Charles Darwin, has so filled the world with admiration, that 
the ideas of other, older authors, notably Lamarck, have been lost 
sight of by the public. Indeed, many a professional naturalist has 
not read Lamarck’s “Philosophic Zoologique.” Of late, the fol- 
lowers of a new school, the so-called Neolamarckian, with an occa- 
sional supporter of Lamarck, have brought the name of the once 
famous French naturalist into literature again. 
Lamarck was not .simply a philosopher, a maker of theories, a 
class of late so often held in contempt ; he was a great natural- 
ist, a keen observer, profoundly learned and the founder of many 
advances in natural history. He classed animals^by their systems 
and structure, that is, on a natural basis ; steadily opposed any em- 
pirical classification based on a few arbitrary features and insisted 
that species blended, ran into one another, and thus could not be 
separated. This all seems very simple and commonplace to-day ; 
but in the time of Cuvier and Geoff roy Saint-Hilaire it was far oth- 
erwise, as is shown by these two men of undoubted genius oppos- 
ing him. Indeed, it is to-day rare to find the man who has tom 
himself away from species and who recognizes the individual as 
the true unit in biology. 
But Lamarck went farther ; not content with showing that ani- 
mals changed in the course of time, he endeavored to show why 
and how they changed. His doctrines may be brought together 
into three great laws, the first of which is rather tacitly assumed 
than expressed in his works. 
First, that there is an underlying law inherent in life by which, 
in the course of ages, animals slowly grow in structure and com- 
plexity from generation to generation. If life began once for all 
time, according to this law the world would now be tenanted by 
only higher forms, the descendants of by-gone lower forms. But 
