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Updated: May 4, 2025
Until continued personality and memory are connected with the idea of heredity, heredity of any kind is little more than a term for something which one does not understand. But there seems little a priori difficulty as regards Lamarck's main idea, now that Mr. Darwin has familiarised us with evolution, and made us feel what a vast array of facts can be brought forward in support of it. Mr.
As for the statement in the passage quoted from Mr. Wallace, to the effect that Lamarck's hypothesis "has been repeatedly and easily refuted by all writers on the subject of varieties and species," it is a very surprising one.
Those who wish to form a closer acquaintance with the different advocates of the evolution theory before Darwin's appearance, will find them carefully arranged in the historical sketch which Darwin gives in the introduction to his work on "The Origin of Species"; and the most important extracts of Lamarck's "Philosophie Zoologique" are to be found in Oscar Schmidt's "Descent and Darwinism."
It may now be useful to offer some remarks on the very different reception which the twin branches of Lamarck's development theory, namely, progression and transmutation, have met with, and to inquire into the causes of the popularity of the one and the great unpopularity of the other.
Ten years ago Lamarck's name was mentioned only as a byword for extravagance; now, we cannot take up a number of Nature without seeing how hot the contention is between his followers and those of Weismann. This must be referred, as I implied earlier, to growing perception that Mr. Darwin should either have gone farther towards Lamarckism or not so far.
This last mentioned deficiency seems to have been the main cause of Lamarck's views soon being lost sight of.
A calm of several days, between eighteen and twenty degrees of north latitude, during our passage to Kamtschatka, afforded opportunities for the observation of several remarkable animals. A small animal of Lamarck's family of Heteropodes, with two rows of separate fins, received the name Tomopteris.
Your exposition of Natural Selection seems to me inimitably good; there never lived a better expounder than you. I was also much pleased at your discussing the difference between our views and Lamarck's.
Lamarck's hypothesis is no doubt a great help and a great step toward Professor Hering's; it makes a known cause underlie variations, and thus is free from those fatal objections which Professor Mivart and others have brought against the theory of Messrs. Darwin and Wallace; but how does the theory that use develops an organism explain why offspring repeat the organism at all?
Indeed his doctrine was no doctrine, but only a back-door for himself to escape by in the event of flood or fire; the flood and fire have come; it remains to be seen how far the door will work satisfactorily. Professor Ray Lankester, again, should not say that Lamarck's doctrine has been "so often tried and rejected." It never has not at least in connection with the name of its propounder.
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