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I accordingly gathered as much as I could second-hand of what Lamarck had said, reserving a study of his "Philosophie Zoologique" for another occasion, and read as much about ants and bees as I could find in readily accessible works. In a few days I saw my way again; and now, reading the "Origin of Species" more closely, and I may say more sceptically, the antagonism between Mr.
Neither Erasmus Darwin, nor Lamarck, had any inkling of the possibility of this process of "natural selection"; and though it had been foreshadowed by Wells in 1813, and more fully stated by Matthew in 1831, the speculations of the latter writer remained unknown to naturalists until after the publication of the "Origin of Species."
LAMARCK; DARWIN; SPENCER. The Frenchman Lamarck in the eighteenth century had already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely a naturalist, set it forth clearly, Spencer again stated it and drew from it consequences of general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, the evolutionist theory contains no immorality.
"I hold no degrees, honors, or diplomas whatever, and I have not wasted one second of my life in any college, university, academy, or other alleged institution of learning. The degrees good enough for Roger Bacon, Erasmus Darwin, Lavoisier, Linnaeus and Lamarck are good enough for me.
Before indicating the conclusions reached in the first of these works, we should point out to what extent Darwin had been preceded by dissenters from the belief once almost universally entertained by biologists that species were independently created, and, once created, were immutable. Lamarck was the first naturalist whose divergent views upon the subject excited much attention.
The most eminent of these writers was a great French naturalist, Lamarck, who published an elaborate work, the Philosophie Zoologique, in which he endeavoured to prove that all animals whatever are descended from other species of animals.
It was not really a native plant, but one that had been introduced from America and belongs to an American genus. I refer to the great evening-primrose or the evening-primrose of Lamarck. A strain of this beautiful species is growing in an abandoned field in the vicinity of Hilversum, at a short distance from Amsterdam. Here it has escaped from a park and multiplied.
By an instinctive recognition of this family likeness between plants, botanists have been led to seek for structural characters on which to unite them, and the groups so founded generally correspond with the combinations suggested by their appearance. By a like process Lamarck combined animals into families.
They made no attempt to prove it, and the conception was without influence upon the thinking of the ordinary man. This remains true until the time of Lamarck. This French genius succeeded in persuading not a few people of the validity of the idea of evolution. He probably could have convinced many more had it not been for the hostility of Cuvier.
Field of Norwich, with a disquisition, in which he endeavourved to prove that, from a philological point of view, neither Treviranus nor Lamarck had any right to coin this new word "Biology" for their purpose; that, in fact, the Greek word "Bios" had relation only to human life and human affairs, and that a different word was employed by the Greeks when they wished to speak of the life of animals and plants.
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