“When I came to the conclusion that after all Lamarck was going to be shown to be right, that we must ‘go the whole orang,’ I re-read his book, and remembering when it was written, I felt I had done him injustice.
“Even as to man’s gradual acquisition of more and more ideas, and then of speech slowly as the ideas multiplied, and then his persecution of the beings most nearly allied and competing with him—all this is very Darwinian.
“The substitution of the variety-making power for ‘volition,’ ‘muscular action,’ etc. (and in plants even volition was not called in), is in some respects only a change of names. Call a new variety a new creation, one may say of the former, as of the latter, what you say when you observe that the creationist explains nothing, and only affirms ‘it is so because it is so.’
“Lamarck’s belief in the slow changes in the organic and inorganic world in the year 1800 was surely above the standard of his times, and he was right about progression in the main, though you have vastly advanced that doctrine. As to Owen in his ‘Aye Aye’ paper, he seems to me a disciple of Pouchet, who converted him at Rouen to ‘spontaneous generation.’
“Have I not, at p. 412, put the vast distinction between you and Lamarck as to ‘necessary progression’ strongly enough?” (To Darwin, March 15, 1863. Lyell’s Letters, ii., p. 365.)
Darwin, in the freedom of private correspondence, paid scant respect to the views of his renowned predecessor, as the following extracts from his published letters will show:
“Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression,’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals,’ etc. But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so.” (Darwin’s Life and Letters, ii., p. 23, 1844.)
“With respect to books on this subject, I do not know of any systematical ones, except Lamarck’s, which is veritable rubbish.... Is it not strange that the author of such a book as the Animaux sans Vertèbres should have written that insects, which never see their eggs, should will (and plants, their seeds) to be of particular forms, so as to become attached to particular objects.”[57] (ii., p. 29, 1844.)
“Lamarck is the only exception, that I can think of, of an accurate describer of species, at least in the Invertebrate Kingdom, who has disbelieved in permanent species, but he in his absurd though clever work has done the subject harm.” (ii., p. 39, no date.)
“To talk of climate or Lamarckian habit producing such adaptions to other organic beings is futile.” (ii., p. 121, 1858.)
On the other hand, another great English thinker and naturalist of rare breadth and catholicity, and despite the fact that he rejected Lamarck’s peculiar evolutional views, associated him with the most eminent biologists.
In a letter to Romanes, dated in 1882, Huxley thus estimates Lamarck’s position in the scientific world:
“I am not likely to take a low view of Darwin’s position in the history of science, but I am disposed to think that Buffon and Lamarck would run him hard in both genius and fertility. In breadth of view and in extent of knowledge these two men were giants, though we are apt to forget their services. Von Bär was another man of the same stamp; Cuvier, in a somewhat lower rank, another; and J. Müller another.” (Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, ii., p. 42, 1900.)
The memory of Lamarck is deeply and warmly cherished throughout France. He gave his country a second Linné. One of the leading botanists in Europe, and the greatest zoölogist of his time, he now shares equally with Geoffroy St. Hilaire and with Cuvier the distinction of raising biological science to that eminence in the first third of the nineteenth century which placed France, as the mother of biologists, in the van of all the nations. When we add to his triumphs in pure zoölogy the fact that he was in his time the philosopher of biology, it is not going too far to crown him as one of the intellectual glories, not only of France, but of the civilized world.