The impression we get from reading Buffon, is that he did not realize the importance of those great evolutionary ideas which he stated so well and repudiated as regularly. Had he done so and stood by them, he would have been the Darwin of his day, but he would in all likelihood have spent the latter part of his life in the Bastile.
Not until forty years later do we meet the real and valiant precursor of Darwin, albeit a countryman of Buffon’s, but with a more profoundly philosophical mind and without his fear. This was Jean Baptiste Lamarck, born at Bazentin, France, 1744, and educated at the college of the Jesuits at Amiens. He served in the seven years war and then occupied himself studying medicine and science at Paris. He died, poor and blind, in 1829.
Lamarck boldly proclaimed his unshakable faith in the doctrine of the transformation of species, and defended it against the strong tide of popular disfavor and the overwhelming opposition provoked by the antagonism of the great zoologist Cuvier. Cuvier’s opposition would have crushed a weaker man but Lamarck bore bravely up and calmly left his case for the future to decide. Cuvier held species to be constant, as was consonant with current and orthodox ideas. This made him a social favorite and the pet of the church, and honors were showered profusely upon him to the end of his days. Not so Lamarck; although born 25 years earlier, his theories were half a century in advance of Cuvier’s, and he paid the penalty that has so often overtaken those pioneers whose vision anticipated the future.
“Attacked on all sides,” says his friend and colleague, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, “injured likewise by odious ridicule, Lamarck, too indignant to answer these cutting epigrams, submitted to the indignity with a sorrowful patience.... Lamarck lived a long while poor, blind, and forsaken, but not by me; I shall ever love and venerate him.” Another writer of that period exclaims, “Lamarck, thy abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is better than the ephemeral glory of men who maintain their reputation by sharing in the errors of their time.” As to Cuvier, the one stain on his career is his unworthy attitude toward his celebrated opponent and fellow worker. Lamarck had, with his usual generosity, aided and favored him when he first came to the Museum of Natural History at Paris, allowing him to hold, in addition to his own chair, which was in Vertebrate Zoology, the chair of Molluscs, which was in Lamarck’s special field, where he had no equal, and which was properly his. But Lamarck opposed, with great politeness and without mentioning his name the attempt made by Cuvier to harmonize science with the orthodox theology of his day by means of that theory of “cataclysms” which in spite of its being strenuously defended by so recent a thinker as Agassiz, has been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories.
When Lamarck died, Cuvier as his most notable contemporary was called upon to pronounce his eulogy. What a miserable and unworthy performance it was! Even after death, religious antipathy—that ever-flowing fountain of meanness—survived in Cuvier’s breast, and De Blainville records that “the Academy did not even allow it to be printed in the form in which it was pronounced,” and it is said that portions of it had to be omitted as unfit for publication. Haeckel, speaking of Lamarck’s great book, “Zoological Philosophy,” complains that “Cuvier, Lamarck’s greatest opponent, in his ‘Report on the Progress of Natural Science,’ in which the most unimportant anatomical investigations are enumerated, does not devote a single word to this work, which forms an epoch in science.”
But history has reversed the scales and posterity has repaired the wrong. That theory of biological evolution, which was despised and rejected by the builders of his day has become the corner-stone of modern knowledge, while Cuvier’s fantastic “Theory of the Earth” has gone to the museum of curiosities.
Lamarck’s immortality is secured by his assertion and defense of the theory of descent, alone. This theory is, that all existing species have descended from ancestors who were in a vast number of cases, and ultimately in all, very different from their present representatives; that this difference is due, not to the total extinction of the previous species by “cataclysms,” and the divine creation of new ones, as Cuvier maintained, but because previous species changed in adapting themselves to a changed environment.
But Lamarck has another claim to a niche in the Pantheon of Science. As the conviction gained ground that species were not fixed and immutable as they came from the hands of an alleged creator, but were the products of an evolutionary development extending through immense periods of time, another question arose and called for an answer. That question was—“By what process?”
Charles Darwin is the most illustrious of all the sons of science because he answered that question. Lamarck gave an answer, and the question as to whether that answer is entitled to be incorporated in the answer of Darwin, as a supplementary amendment is sometimes made a part of the motion, still divides the biological world into two camps. But in that controversy between the Weismannians and the Neo-Lamarckians, aptly called “The Battle of the Darwinians,” no matter what becomes of the Lamarckian factor, all are agreed that the “Natural Selection” of Darwin is impregnable.
Lamarck’s theory may be summed up as follows—