“His excellences,” says Cleland, speaking of Lamarck as a scientific observer, “were width of scope, fertility of ideas, and a preëminent faculty of precise description, arising not only from a singularly terse style, but from a clear insight into both the distinctive features and the resemblance of forms” (Encyc. Britannica, Art. Lamarck).
The work, moreover, is remarkable for being the first one to begin with the simplest and to end with the most highly developed forms.
Lamarck’s special line of study was the Mollusca. How his work is still regarded by malacologists is shown by the following letter from our leading student of molluscs, Dr. W. H. Dall:
“Smithsonian Institution,
“United States National Museum,
Washington, D. C.,
“November 4, 1899.“Lamarck was one of the best naturalists of his time, when geniuses abounded. His work was the first well-marked step toward a natural system as opposed to the formalities of Linné. He owed something to Cuvier, yet he knew how to utilize the work in anatomy offered by Cuvier in making a natural classification. His failing eyesight, which obliged him latterly to trust to the eyes of others; his poverty and trials of various kinds, more than excuse the occasional slips which we find in some of the later volumes of the Animaux sans Vertèbres. These are rather of the character of typographical errors than faults of scheme or principle.
“The work of Lamarck is really the foundation of rational natural malacological classification; practically all that came before his time was artificial in comparison. Work that came later was in the line of expansion and elaboration of Lamarck’s, without any change of principle. Only with the application of embryology and microscopical work of the most modern type has there come any essential change of method, and this is rather a new method of getting at the facts than any fundamental change in the way of using them when found. I shall await your work on Lamarck’s biography with great interest.
“I remain,
“Yours sincerely,
“William H. Dall.”
FOOTNOTES:
[119] During the same period (1803–1829) Russia sent out expeditions to the North and Northeast, accompanied by the zoölogists Tilesius, Langsdorff, Chamisso, Eschscholtz, and Brandt, all of them of German birth and education. From 1823 to 1850 England fitted up and sent out exploring expeditions commanded by Beechey, Fitzroy, Belcher, Ross, Franklin, and Stanley, the naturalists of which were Bennett, Owen, Darwin, Adams, and Huxley. From Germany, less of a maritime country, at a later date, Humboldt, Spix, Prince Wied-Neuwied, Natterer, Perty, and others made memorable exploring expeditions and journeys.
[120] These papers have been mercilessly criticised by Blainville in his “Cuvier et Geoffroy St. Hilaire.” In the second article—i.e., on the anatomy of the limpet—Cuvier, in considering the organs, follows no definite plan; he gives a description “tout-a-fait fantastique” of the muscular fibres of the foot, and among other errors in this first essay on comparative anatomy he mistakes the tongue for the intromittent organ; the salivary glands, and what is probably part of the brain, being regarded as the testes, with other “erreurs matérielles inconcevables, même à l’époque ou elle fut rédigée.” In his first article he mistakes a species of the myriapod genus Glomeris for the isopod genus Armadillo. In this he is corrected by the editor (possibly Lamarck himself), who remarks in a footnote that the forms to which M. Cuvier refers under the name of Armadillo are veritable species of Julus. We have verified these criticisms of Cuvier by reference to his papers in the “Journal.” It is of interest to note, as Blainville does, that Cuvier at this period admits that there is a passage from the Isopoda to the armadilloes and Julus. Cuvier, then twenty-three years old, wrote: “Nous sommes donc descendus par degrès, des Écrevisses aux Squilles, de celles-ci aux Aselles, puis aux Cloportes, aux Armadilles et aux Ïules” (Journal d’Hist. nat., tom. ii., p. 29, 1792). These errors, as regards the limpet, were afterwards corrected by Cuvier (though he does not refer to his original papers) in his Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire et à l’Anatomie des Mollusques (1817).
[121] Tableau élémentaire de l’Histoire naturelle des Animaux. Paris, An VI. (1798). 8vo, pp. 710. With 14 plates.
[122] Tome i., p. 123.
[123] In his Histoire des Progrès des Sciences naturelles Cuvier takes to himself part of the credit of founding the class Crustacea, stating that Aristotle had already placed them in a class by themselves, and adding, “MM. Cuvier et de Lamarck les en out distingués par des caractères de premier ordre tirés de leur circulation.” Undoubtedly Cuvier described the circulation, but it was Lamarck who actually realized the taxonomic importance of this feature and placed them in a distinct class.