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If Lamarck could have shown experimentally that even races of animals could be produced in this way, there might have been some ground for his speculations. But he could show nothing of the kind, and his hypothesis has pretty well dropped into oblivion, as it deserved to do. I said in an earlier lecture that there are hypotheses and hypotheses, and when people tell you that Mr.
Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck, with that of Mr. Charles Darwin, with copious extracts from the works of the three first-named writers." In this book I was hardly able to conceal the fact that, in spite of the obligations under which we must always remain to Mr. Darwin, I had lost my respect for him and for his work.
And in 1809, before the battle of Waterloo, a French soldier named Lamarck, who had beaten his musket into a microscope and turned zoologist, declared that species were an illusion produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they were constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so slowly that it looks stationary to us.
In his "Philosophic Zoologique" , Lamarck first explicitly formulated his ideas as to the transmutation of species, though he had outlined them as early as 1801. The changes in the species have been wrought, he said, through the unceasing efforts of each organism to meet the needs imposed upon it by its environment.
To this objection Lamarck would, no doubt, have answered that there had not been time for bringing about so great an amount of variation; for when Cuvier and some other of his contemporaries appealed to the embalmed animals and plants taken from Egyptian tombs, some of them 3000 years old, which had not experienced in that long period the slightest modification in their specific characters, he replied that the climate and soil of the valley of the Nile had not varied in the interval, and that there was therefore no reason for expecting that we should be able to detect any change in the fauna and flora.
Grant Allen, and others, should show some impatience at seeing its value as prime means of modification called in question. Within the last few months, indeed, Mr. Stripped of detail the point at issue is this; whether luck or cunning is the fitter to be insisted on as the main means of organic development. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck answered this question in favour of cunning.
Lamarck passed on from the conception of Evolution as a general law to Charles Darwin's department of it, which was the method of Evolution.
Guessed at by Goethe a hundred years ago, but not expressed in definite form until formulated by Lamarck in the beginning of the present century, it was at last, thirty years ago, decisively established by Charles Darwin, his theory of selection filling up the gap which Lamarck in his doctrine of the reciprocal influence of heredity and adaptation had left open.
I have often wondered why it is that men should be so fearful of new ventures in social relationships, when I have found them so fertile, so enjoyable. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck began groping for the great laws of natural unity.
Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable. In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' 'Biologie. However, I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the 'Vestiges' with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my negative and critical attitude.
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