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Updated: May 4, 2025
While in 1832 I argued against Lamarck's doctrine of the gradual transmutation of one species into another, I agreed with him in believing that the system of changes now in progress in the organic world would afford, when fully understood, a complete key to the interpretation of all the vicissitudes of the living creation in past ages.
In my garden it has proved to be constant from seed, never reverting to the original lamarckiana, provided intercrossing was excluded. It is chiefly distinguished from Lamarck's evening-primrose by its smooth leaves, as the name indicates. The leaves of the original form show numerous sinuosities in their blades, not at the edge, but anywhere between the veins.
Sometimes they fertilize themselves without any aid, as for instance, the common evening-primrose; in other cases the pollen has to be placed on the stigma artificially, as with Lamarck's evening-primrose and its derivatives. Other plants need cross-fertilization in order to produce a normal yield of seeds.
Weismannism, therefore, is the inevitable outcome of the straits to which Charles-Darwinians were reduced through the way in which their leader had halted between two opinions. This is why Charles-Darwinians, from Professor Huxley downwards, have kept the difference between Lamarck's opinions and those of Mr. Darwin so much in the background.
Haeckel points out that if Goethe had known Lamarck's work his genius would have gained for the "Philosophie Zoölogique" the interest and respect of the reading world. But Cuvier laughed it out of court, and only in comparatively modern times, since Darwin's work has set the world thinking anew, is Lamarck's career recognized at its true value.
Darwin of Lamarck's work; and even Erasmus Darwin is mentioned inaccurately but still he is mentioned. Professor Haeckel says: Later on, after giving nearly a hundred pages to the works of the early evolutionists pages that would certainly disquiet the sensitive writer who had cut out the "my" which disappeared in 1866- -he continued:
A much more important attempt to do something for Lamarck's hypothesis, of the transmission to offspring of structural peculiarities acquired by the parents, was recently made by an able and experienced naturalist, Professor Semper of Wurzburg.
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.
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. The best attempt at an answer to Erasmus Darwin that has yet been made is Paley's Natural Theology, which was throughout obviously written to meet Buffon and the Zoonomia.
But he would have liked, at the same time, to keep the name of creation for a natural process which he imagined to be incomprehensible. And though he is evidently alarmed at the pithecoid origin of man involved in Lamarck's doctrine, he observes: "But, after all, what changes species may really undergo!
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