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In fact, I may say there were three men to whom this idea occurred contemporaneously, although there were but two who carried it into effect, and only one who worked it out completely. The persons to whom I refer were the eminent physiologist Bichat, and the great naturalist Lamarck, in France; and a distinguished German, Treviranus.
In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, Treviranus, and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications.
Perhaps, too, there is concerned a physiological law, which, though somewhat mysterious, I may again have to summon to my aid in the way of explanation. It is known as the law of Treviranus, its discoverer, and may thus be briefly stated: Each organ is to every other as an excreting organ.
About the same time it occurred to Treviranus, that all those sciences which deal with living matter are essentially and fundamentally one, and ought to be treated as a whole; and, in the year 1802, he published the first volume of what he also called "Biologie." Treviranus's great merit lies in this, that he worked out his idea, and wrote the very remarkable book to which I refer.
Moreover, there were various physiologists who earlier than any of these had foreshadowed the cell theory notably Kaspar Friedrich Wolff, towards the close of the previous century, and Treviranus about 1807, But, as we have seen in so many other departments of science, it is one thing to foreshadow a discovery, it is quite another to give it full expression and make it germinal of other discoveries.
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.
Even Treviranus has got no farther than this point. Lamarck introduced the conception of the action of an animal on itself as a factor in producing modification.
Of these the most conspicuous is that of Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, a German naturalist physician, professor of mathematics in the lyceum at Bremen.
It was an interesting coincidence that Treviranus should have published the first volume of his Biologie, oder Philosophie der lebenden Natur, in which his views on the transmutation of species were expounded, in 1802, the same twelvemonth in which Lamarck's first exposition of the same doctrine appeared in his Recherches sur l'Organisation des Corps Vivants.
And it is hard to say whether Lamarck or Treviranus has the priority in propounding the main thesis of the doctrine of evolution; for though the first volume of Treviranus's "Biologie" appeared only in 1802, he says, in the preface to his later work, the "Erscheinungen und Gesetze des organischen Lebens," dated 1831, that he wrote the first volume of the "Biologie" "nearly five-and-thirty years ago," or about 1796.
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