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Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution

A >> Alpheus Spring Packard >> Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution




The following evidently heartfelt and sincere tribute to his memory,
showing warm esteem and thorough respect for Lamarck, and also a
confident feeling that his lasting fame was secure, is to be found in an
obscure little book[54] containing satirical, humorous, but perhaps not
always fair or just, characterizations and squibs concerning the
professors and aid-naturalists of the Jardin des Plantes.

"What head will not be uncovered on hearing pronounced the name of
the man whose genius was ignored and who languished steeped in
bitterness. Blind, poor, forgotten, he remained alone with a glory
of whose extent he himself was conscious, but which only the coming
ages will sanction, when shall be revealed more clearly the laws of
organization.

"Lamarck, thy abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is better
than the ephemeral glory of men who only maintain their reputation
by sharing in the errors of their time.

"Honor to thee! Respect to thy memory! Thou hast died in the breach
while fighting for truth, and the truth assures thee immortality."

Lamarck's theoretical views were not known in Germany until many years
after his death. Had Goethe, his contemporary (1749-1832), known of
them, he would undoubtedly have welcomed his speculations, have
expressed his appreciation of them, and Lamarck's reputation would, in
his own lifetime, have raised him from the obscurity of his later years
at Paris.

Hearty appreciation, though late in the century, came from Ernst
Haeckel, whose bold and suggestive works have been so widely read. In
his _History of Creation_ (1868) he thus estimates Lamarck's work as a
philosopher:

"To him will always belong the immortal glory of having for the
first time worked out the theory of descent, as an independent
scientific theory of the first order, and as the philosophical
foundation of the whole science of biology."

Referring to the _Philosophie Zoologique_, he says:

"This admirable work is the first connected exposition of the theory
of descent carried out strictly into all its consequences. By its
purely mechanical method of viewing organic nature, and the strictly
philosophical proofs brought forward in it, Lamarck's work is raised
far above the prevailing dualistic views of his time; and with the
exception of Darwin's work, which appeared just half a century
later, we know of none which we could, in this respect, place by the
side of the _Philosophie Zoologique_. How far it was in advance of
its time is perhaps best seen from the circumstance that it was not
understood by most men, and for fifty years was not spoken of at
all. 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. Goethe, also,
who took such a lively interest in the French nature-philosophy and
in the 'thoughts of kindred minds beyond the Rhine,' nowhere
mentions Lamarck, and does not seem to have known the _Philosophie
Zoologique_ at all."

Again in 1882 Haeckel writes:[55]

"We regard it as a truly tragic fact that the _Philosophie
Zoologique_ of Lamarck, one of the greatest productions of the great
literary period of the beginning of our century, received at first
only the slightest notice, and within a few years became wholly
forgotten.... Not until fully fifty years later, when Darwin
breathed new life into the transformation views founded therein, was
the buried treasure again recovered, and we cannot refrain from
regarding it as the most complete presentation of the development
theory before Darwin.

"While Lamarck clearly expressed all the essential fundamental ideas
of our present doctrine of descent; and excites our admiration at
the depth of his morphological knowledge, he none the less surprises
us by the prophetic (_vorausschauende_) clearness of his
physiological conceptions."

In his views on life, the nature of the will and reason, and other
subjects, Haeckel declares that Lamarck was far above most of his
contemporaries, and that he sketched out a programme of the biology of
the future which was not carried out until our day.

J. Victor Carus[56] also claims for Lamarck "the lasting merit of having
been the first to have placed the theory (of descent) on a scientific
foundation."

The best, most catholic, and just exposition of Lamarck's views, and
which is still worth reading, is that by Lyell Chapters XXXIV.-XXXVI. of
his _Principles of Geology_, 1830, and though at that time one would not
look for an acceptance of views which then seemed extraordinary and,
indeed, far-fetched, Lyell had no words of satire and ridicule, only a
calm, able statement and discussion of his principles. Indeed, it is
well known that when, in after years, his friend Charles Darwin
published his views, Lyell expressed some leaning towards the older
speculations of Lamarck.

Lyell's opinions as to the interest and value of Lamarck's ideas may be
found in his _Life and Letters_, and also in the _Life and Letters of
Charles Darwin_. In the chapter, _On the Reception of the Origin of
Species_, by Huxley, are the following extracts from Lyell's _Letters_
(ii., pp. 179-204). In a letter addressed to Mantell (dated March 2,
1827), Lyell speaks of having just read Lamarck; he expresses his
delight at Lamarck's theories, and his personal freedom from any
objections based on theological grounds. And though he is evidently
alarmed at the pithecoid origin of man involved in Lamarck's doctrine,
he observes: "But, after all, what changes species may really undergo!
How impossible will it be to distinguish and lay down a line beyond
which some of the so-called extinct species have never passed into
recent ones?"

He also quotes a remarkable passage in the postscript to a letter
written to Sir John Herschel in 1836: "In regard to the origination of
new species, I am very glad to find that you think it probable it may be
carried on through the intervention of intermediate causes."

How nearly Lyell was made a convert to evolution by reading Lamarck's
works may be seen by the following extracts from his letters, quoted by
Huxley:

"I think the old 'creation' is almost as much required as ever, but
of course it takes a new form if Lamarck's views, improved by yours,
are adopted." (To Darwin, March 11, 1863, p. 363.)

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"As to Lamarck, I find that Grove, who has been reading him, is
wonderfully struck with his book. I remember that it was the
conclusion he (Lamarck) came to about man, that fortified me thirty
years ago against the great impression which his argument at first
made on my mind--all the greater because Constant Prevost, a pupil
of Cuvier forty years ago, told me his conviction 'that Cuvier
thought species not real, but that science could not advance without
assuming that they were so.'"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"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 Vertebres_ 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 Baer was another man of the
same stamp; Cuvier, in a somewhat lower rank, another; and J. Mueller
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 Linne. One of the leading botanists in
Europe, and the greatest zooelogist 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 zooelogy 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.

How warmly his memory is now cherished may be appreciated by the perusal
of the following letter, with its delightful reminiscences, for which we
are indebted to the venerable and distinguished zooelogist and
comparative anatomist who formerly occupied the chair made illustrious
by Lamarck, and by his successor, De Blainville, and who founded the
Laboratoire Arago on the Mediterranean, also that of Experimental
Zooelogy at Roscoff, and who still conducts the _Journal de Zoologie
Experimentale_.


PARIS LE 28 _Decembre_, 1899.

M. le PROFESSEUR PACKARD.

_Cher Monsieur_: Vous m'avez fait l'honneur de me demander des
renseignements sur la famille de De Lamarck, et sur ses relations,
afin de vous en servir dans la biographie que vous preparez de
notre grand naturaliste.

Je n'ai rien appris de plus que ce que vous voulez bien me rappeler
comme l'ayant trouve dans mon adresse de 1889. Je ne connais plus ni
les noms ni les adresses des parents de De Lamarck, et c'est avec
regret qu'il ne m'est pas possible de repondre a vos desirs.

Lorsque je commencai mes etudes a Paris, on ne s'occupait guere des
idees generales de De Lamarck que pour s'en moquer. Excepte Geoffroy
St. Hilaire et De Blainville, dont j'ai pu suivre les belles lecons
et qui le citaient souvent, on parlait peu de la philosophie
zoologique.

Il m'a ete possible de causer avec des anciens collegues du grand
naturaliste; au Jardin des Plantes de tres grands savants, dont je
ne veux pas ecrire le nom, le traitaient _de fou_!

Il avait loue un appartement sur le haut d'une maison, et la
cherchait d'apres la direction des nuages a prevoir l'etat du temps.

On riait de ces etudes. N'est-ce pas comme un observatoire de
meteorologie que ce savant zoologiste avait pour ainsi dire fonde
avant que la science ne se fut emparee de l'idee?

Lorsque j'eus l'honneur d'etre nomme professeur au Jardin des
Plantes en 1865, je fis l'historique de la chaire que j'occupais, et
qui avait ete illustree par De Lamarck et De Blainville. Je crois
que je suis le premier a avoir fait l'histoire de notre grand
naturaliste dans un cours public. Je dus travailler pas mal pour
arriver a bien saisir l'idee fondamentale de la philosophie. Les
definitions de la nature et des forces qui president aux changements
qui modifient les etres d'apres les conditions auxquelles ils sont
soumis ne sont pas toujours faciles a rendre claires pour un public
souvent difficile.

Ce qui frappe surtout dans ses raisonnements, c'est que De Lamarck
est parfaitement logique. Il comprend tres bien ce que plus d'un
transformiste de nos jours ne cherche pas a eclairer, que le premier
pas, le pas difficile a faire pour arriver a expliquer la creation
par des modifications successives, c'est le passage de la matiere
inorganique a la matiere organisee, et il imagine la chaleur et
l'electricite comme etant les deux facteurs qui par attraction ou
repulsion finissent par former ces petits amas organises qui seront
le point de depart de toutes les transformations de tous les
organismes.

Voila le point de depart--la generation spontanee se trouve ainsi
expliquee!

De Lamarck etait un grand et profond observateur. On me disait au
Museum (des contemporains) qu'il avait l'Instinct de l'Espece. Il y
aurait beaucoup a dire sur cette expression--l'instinct de
l'espece--il m'est difficile dans une simple lettre de developper
des idees philosophiques que j'ai sur cette question,--laquelle
suppose la notion de l'individu parfaitement definie et acquis.

Je ne vous citerai qu'un exemple. Je ne l'ai vu signale nulle part
dans les ouvrages anciens sur De Lamarck.

Qu'etaient nos connaissances a l'epoque de De Lamarck sur les
Polypiers? Les Hydraires etaient loin d'avoir fourni les
remarquables observations qui parurent dans le milieu a peu pres du
siecle qui vient de finir, et cependant De Lamarck deplace hardiment
la Lucernaire--l'eloigne des Coralliaires, et la rapproche des etres
qui forment le grand groupe des Hydraires. Ce trait me parait
remarquable et le rapporte a cette reputation qu'il avait au Museum
de jouir de l'instinct de l'espece.

De toute part on acclame le grand naturaliste, et'il n'y a pas meme
une rue portant son nom aux environs du Jardin des Plantes? J'ai eu
beau reclamer le conseil municipal de Paris a d'autres favoris que
De Lamarck.

Lorsque le Jardin des Plantes fut reorganise par la Convention, De
Lamarck avait 50 ans. Il ne s'etait jusqu'alors occupe que de
botanique. Il fut a cet age charge de l'histoire de la partie du
regne animal renfermant les animaux invertebres sauf les Insectes et
les Crustaces. La chaire est restee la meme; elle comprend les vers,
les helminthes, les mollusques, et ce qu'on appelait autrefois les
Zoophytes ou Rayonnees, enfin les Infusoires. Quelle puissance de
travail! Ne fallait-il pas pour passer de la Botanique, a 50 ans, a
la Zoologie, et laisser un ouvrage semblable a celui qui illustre
encore le nom du Botaniste devenue Zoologiste par ordre de la
Convention!

Sans doute dans cet ouvrage il y a bien des choses qui ne sont plus
acceptables--mais pour le juger avec equite, il faut se porter a
l'epoque ou il fut fait, et alors on est pris d'admiration pour
l'auteur d'un aussi immense travail.

J'ai une grande admiration pour le genie de De Lamarck, et je ne
puis que vous louer de le faire encore mieux connaitre de nos
contemporains.

Recevez, mon cher collegue, l'expression de mes sentiments d'estime
pour vos travaux remarquables et croyez-moi--tout a vous,

H. DE LACAZE DUTHIERS.


FOOTNOTES:

[50] For example, while Cuvier's chair was in the field of vertebrate
zooelogy, owing to the kindness of Lamarck ("_par gracieusete de la part
de M. de Lamarck_") he had retained that of Mollusca, and yet it was in
the special classification of the molluscs that Lamarck did his best
work (Blainville, _l. c._, p. 116).

[51] De Blainville states that "the Academy did not even allow it to be
printed in the form in which it was pronounced" (p. 324); and again he
speaks of the lack of judgment in Cuvier's estimate of Lamarck, "the
naturalist who had the greatest force in the general conception of
beings and of phenomena, although he might often be far from the path"
(p. 323).

[52] _Fragments Biographiques_, pp. 209-219.

[53] _L. c._ p. 81.

[54] _Histoire Naturelle Drolatique et Philosophique des Professeurs du
Jardin des Plantes, _etc._ Par Isid. S. de Gosse. Avec des Annotations
de M. Frederic Gerard._ Paris, 1847.

[55] _Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, Goethe und Lamarck_, Jena, 1882.

[56] _Geschichte der Zoologie bis auf Joh. Mueller und Charles Darwin_,
1872.

[57] We have been unable to find these statements in any of Lamarck's
writings.




CHAPTER VII

LAMARCK'S WORK IN METEOROLOGY AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE


When a medical student in Paris, Lamarck, from day to day watching the
clouds from his attic windows, became much interested in meteorology,
and, indeed, at first this subject had nearly as much attraction for him
as botany. For a long period he pursued these studies, and he was the
first one to foretell the probabilities of the weather, thus
anticipating by over half a century the modern idea of making the
science of meteorology of practical use to mankind.

His article, "De l'influence de la lune sur l'atmosphere terrestre,"
appeared in the _Journal de Physique_ for 1798, and was translated in
two English journals. The titles of several other essays will be found
in the Bibliography at the close of this volume.

From 1799 to 1810 he regularly published an annual meteorological report
containing the statement of probabilities acquired by a long series of
observations on the state of the weather and the variations of the
atmosphere at different times of the year, giving indications of the
periods when to expect pleasant weather, or rain, storms, tempests,
frosts, thaws, etc.; finally the citations of these probabilities of
times favorable to fetes, journeys, voyages, harvesting crops, and
other enterprises dependent on good weather.

Lamarck thus explained the principles on which he based his
probabilities: Two kinds of causes, he says, displace the fluids which
compose the atmosphere, some being variable and irregular, others
constant, whose action is subject to progressive and fixed laws.

Between the tropics constant causes exercise an action so considerable
that the irregular effects of variable causes are there in some degree
lost; hence result the prevailing winds which in these climates become
established and change at determinate epochs.

Beyond the tropics, and especially toward the middle of the temperate
zones, variable causes predominate. We can, however, still discover
there the effects of the action of constant causes, though much
weakened; we can assign them the principal epochs, and in a great number
of cases make this knowledge turn to our profit. It is in the elevation
and depression (_abaissement_) of the moon above and below the celestial
equator that we should seek for the most constant of these causes.

With his usual facility in such matters, he was not long in advancing a
theory, according to which the atmosphere is regarded as resembling the
sea, having a surface, waves, and storms; it ought likewise to have a
flux and reflux, for the moon ought to exercise the same influence upon
it that it does on the ocean. In the temperate and frigid zones,
therefore, the wind, which is only the tide of the atmosphere, must
depend greatly on the declination of the moon; it ought to blow toward
the pole that is nearest to it, and advancing in that direction only, in
order to reach every place, traversing dry countries or extensive seas,
it ought then to render the sky serene or stormy. If the influence of
the moon on the weather is denied, it is only that it may be referred to
its phases, but its position in the ecliptic is regarded as affording
probabilities much nearer the truth.[58]

In each of these annuals Lamarck took great care to avoid making any
positive predictions. "No one," he says, "could make these predictions
without deceiving himself and abusing the confidence of persons who
might place reliance on them." He only intended to propose simple
probabilities.

After the publication of the first of these annuals, at the request of
Lamarck, who had made it the subject of a memoir read to the Institute
in 1800 (9 ventose, l'an IX.), Chaptal, Minister of the Interior,
thought it well to establish in France a regular correspondence of
meteorological observations made daily at different points remote from
each other, and he conferred the direction of it on Lamarck. This system
of meteorological reports lasted but a short time, and was not
maintained by Chaptal's successor. After three of these annual reports
had appeared, Lamarck rather suddenly stopped publishing them, and an
incident occurred in connection with their cessation which led to the
story that he had suffered ill treatment and neglect from Napoleon I.

It has been supposed that Lamarck, who was frank and at times brusque in
character, had made some enemies, and that he had been represented to
the Emperor as a maker of almanacs and of weather predictions, and that
Napoleon, during a reception, showing to Lamarck his great
dissatisfaction with the annuals, had ordered him to stop their
publication.

But according to Bourguin's statement this is not the correct version.
He tells us:

"According to traditions preserved in the family of Lamarck things
did not happen so at all. During a reception given to the Institute
at the Tuileries, Napoleon, who really liked Lamarck, spoke to him
in a jocular way about his weather probabilities, and Lamarck, very
much provoked (_tres contrarie_) at being thus chaffed in the
presence of his colleagues, resolved to stop the publication of his
observations on the weather. What proves that this version is the
true one is that Lamarck published another annual which he had in
preparation for the year 1810. In the preface he announced that his
age, ill health, and his circumstances placed him in the unfortunate
necessity of ceasing to busy himself with this periodical work. He
ended by inviting those who had the taste for meteorological
observations, and the means of devoting their time to it, to take up
with confidence an enterprise good in itself, based on a genuine
foundation, and from which the public would derive advantageous
results."

These opuscles, such as they were, in which Lamarck treated different
subjects bearing on the winds, great droughts, rainy seasons, tides,
etc., became the precursors of the _Annuaires du Bureau des
Longitudes_.

An observation of Lamarck's on a rare and curious form of cloud has
quite recently been referred to by a French meteorologist. It is
probable, says M. E. Durand-Greville in _La Nature_, November 24, 1900,
that Lamarck was the first to observe the so-called pocky or festoon
cloud, or mammato-cirrus cloud, which at rare intervals has been
observed since his time.[59]

Full of over confidence in the correctness of his views formed without
reference to experiments, although Lavoisier, by his discovery of oxygen
in the years 1772-85, and other researches, had laid the foundations of
the antiphlogistic or modern chemistry, Lamarck quixotically attempted
to substitute his own speculative views for those of the discoverers of
oxygen--Priestley (1774) and the great French chemist Lavoisier.
Lamarck, in his _Hydrogeologie_ (1802), went so far as to declare:

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