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Updated: April 30, 2025
And he saw him hastily climb over the palings, and then pretend to be there by pure chance, as though he had come up from the Rue Lamarck. When he accosted his two sons, as if he were delighted to meet them, and began to say that he had just come from Paris, Pierre asked himself if he had been dreaming. However, an anxious glance which his brother cast at him convinced him that he had been right.
He at once wrote to the Athenaeum, calling attention to Hering's lecture, and then pursued his studies in evolution. Life and Habit was followed in 1879 by Evolution Old and New, wherein he compared the teleological or purposive view of evolution taken by Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck with the view taken by Charles Darwin, and came to the conclusion that the old was better.
Agassiz was such a wonderful teacher and so genial and so lovable a man that his opposition to evolution held back the advance of the Darwinian idea in America as Cuvier's influence had held back the Lamarckian idea in Europe. For the brilliant Cuvier simply laughed before his students at each "new folly" of Buffon and of Lamarck. Under this ridicule the influence of both men withered and died.
Here, if Darwin is to be defended, it may be shown that those witticisms, aimed at him, about the giraffe getting its long neck by continually stretching it, or the whale getting its tail by holding its hind legs too close in swimming, do not apply to Darwinism, but to the exploded theory of his great predecessor, Lamarck.
It must be remembered that the doctrine of evolution, as he knew it, and in the only form in which it was then stated, was simply and purely that of development by natural selection acting on chance variation, and differing mainly by this from the doctrine of Lamarck, which had long been rejected by the scientific world at large.
Granted that Buff on, Erasmus Darwin, and Lamarck bore the burden and heat of the day before Mr. Charles Darwin was born, they did not bring people round to their opinion, whereas Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace did, and the public cannot be expected to look beyond this broad and indisputable fact. The answer to this is, that the theory which Messrs.
Seven classes of Holothuria were examined; three belonged to the species of Holothuria, called by Lamarck Fistularia, but which name had already been given by Linnæus to the tobacco-pipe fish; the fourth was a species newly discovered, and to which we appropriated the name of Odontopyga, because the fundament is armed with five calcareous teeth; the belly is furnished with small tubes, and the back covered with bumps.
It teaches the validity of natural laws of life in its broadest sense, and crowns the philosophy founded by Newton and Lyell. Lamarck proposed the hypothesis of a common origin of all living beings and this ingenious and thoroughly philosophical conception was warmly welcomed by his partisans, but was not widely accepted owing to lack of supporting evidence.
My own reading has led me to become moderately well acquainted with the literature of evolution, but I have never come across a single attempt fairly to grapple with Lamarck, and it is plain that neither Isidore Geoffroy nor M. Martins knows of such an attempt any more than I do.
Darwin thought during all the forty years or so thus covered exactly as his grandfather and Lamarck had done, and indeed as all sensible people since Buffon wrote have done if they have accepted evolution at all. Then why should he not have said so? What object could he have in writing an elaborate work to support a theory which he knew all the time to be untenable?
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