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Updated: May 4, 2025
When I met him at Holkham, the 'Origin of Species' had not been published; and Napier and I did all we could to get Owen to express some opinion on Lamarck's theory, for he and I used to talk confidentially on this fearful heresy even then. But Owen was ever on his guard. He evaded our questions and changed the subject.
Darwin's strongly-based hypothesis is nothing but a mere modification of Lamarck's, you will know what to think of their capacity for forming a judgment on this subject. But you must recollect that when I say I think it is either Mr.
His idea of the method by which the variation comes about has been accepted and rejected; modified, reaccepted, and again rejected. Lamarck's conception of the cause of progress was somewhat as follows: The desire for any action on the part of an animal leads to efforts to accomplish that desire. From these efforts came gradually the organ and its accompanying powers.
Gates states that Michaux was in the habit of collecting seeds with his specimens, and that it is therefore highly probable that Lamarck's specimens were grown directly from seeds collected in America by Michaux. Gates considers that the suggestion of the hybrid origin of Lamarckiana in culture is thus finally disposed of.
Whatever might be thought of Lamarck's explanation of the cause of transmutation which really was that already suggested by Erasmus Darwin the idea of the evolution for which he contended was but the logical extension of the conception that American animals are the modified and degenerated descendants of European animals.
Lamarck's conjectures, equipped with a new hat and stick, as Sir Walter Scott was wont to say of an old story renovated, formed the foundation of the biological speculations of the 'Vestiges', a work which has done more harm to the progress of sound thought on these matters than any that could be named; and, indeed, I mention it here simply for the purpose of denying that it has anything in common with what essentially characterises Mr.
Grant Allen and Professor Ray Lankester may say about "Mr. Darwin's master-key," nor how many more like hyperboles they brandish, they never put a succinct resume of Mr. Darwin's theory side by side with a similar resume of his grandfather's and Lamarck's? Neither Mr. Darwin himself, not any of those to whose advocacy his reputation is mainly due, have done this.
And when will this theory, the hardihood of which has been greatly exaggerated, become freed from the interpretations and commentaries by the false light of which so many naturalists have formed their opinion concerning it? In 1873 M. Martin published his edition of Lamarck's "Philosophie Zoologique." Professor Huxley in his article on Evolution is no less cavalier than Mr. Wallace.
All the species of animals, therefore, are, in Lamarck's view, the result of the indirect action of changes of circumstance upon those primitive germs which he considered to have originally arisen, by spontaneous generation, within the waters of the globe.
If true, this view would lead to the acceptance of Lamarck's or even Buffon's doctrine, for changes induced in any organ by other than congenital factors could be impressed upon the germ-cell, and would then be transported together with the original specific characters to future generations. Darwin was indeed a good Lamarckian.
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