Now, we find this earth endued precisely with such degree of hardness and consolidation as qualifies it at the same time to be a fruitful earth, and to maintain its station with all the permanency compatible with the nature of things, which are not formed to remain unchangeable.
Thus we have a view of the most perfect wisdom in the contrivance of that constitution by which the earth is made to answer, in the best manner possible, the purpose of its intention, that is, to maintain and perpetuate a system of vegetation, or the various races of useful plants, or a system of living animals, which are in their turn subservient to a system still infinitely more important—I mean a system of intellect. Without fertility in the earth, many races of plants and animals would soon perish, or be extinct; and with permanency in our land it were impossible for the various tribes of plants and animals to be dispersed over the surface of a changing earth. The fact is that fertility, adequate to the various ends in view, is found in all the quarters of the world, or in every country of the earth; and the permanency of our land is such as to make it appear unalterable to mankind in general and even to impose upon men of science, who have endeavoured to persuade us that this earth is not to change.
Nothing but supreme power and wisdom could have reconciled those two opposite ends of intention, so as both to be equally pursued in the system of nature, and so equally attained as to be imperceptible to common observation, and at the same time a proper object of the human understanding.
LAMARCK
Jean Baptiste de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, was born in Picardy, France, Aug. I, 1744, the cadet of an ancient but impoverished house. It was his father's desire that he should enter the Church, but his inclination was for a military life; and having, at the age of seventeen, joined the French army under De Broglie, he had within twenty-four hours the good fortune so to distinguish himself as to win his commission. When the Museum of Natural History was brought into existence in 1794 he was sufficiently well-known as a naturalist to be entrusted with the care of the collections of invertebrates, comprising insects, molluscs, polyps, and worms. Here he continued to lecture until his death in 1829. Haeckel, classifying him in the front rank with Goethe and Darwin, attributes to him "the imperishable glory of having been the first to raise the theory of descent to the rank of an independent scientific theory." The form of his theory was announced in 1801, but was not given in detail to the world until 1809, by the publication of his "Zoological Philosophy" ("Philosophie Zoologique"). The Lamarckian theory of the hereditary transmission of characters acquired by use, disuse, etc., has still a following, though it is controverted by the schools of Darwin and Weissmann. Lamarck died on December 18, 1829.
I.—The Ladder of Life