Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution

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"It is not true, and it seems to me even absurd to believe that pure
air, which has been justly called _vital air_, and which chemists
now call _oxygen gas_, can be the radical of saline matters--namely,
can be the principle of acidity, of causticity, or any salinity
whatever. There are a thousand ways of refuting this error without
the possibility of a reply.... This hypothesis, the best of all
those which had been imagined when Lavoisier conceived it, cannot
now be longer held, since I have discovered what is really
_caloric_" (p. 161).

After paying his respects to Priestley, he asks: "What, then, can be the
reason why the views of chemists and mine are so opposed?" and complains
that the former have avoided all written discussion on this subject. And
this after his three physico-chemical works, the _Refutation_, the
_Recherches_, and the _Memoires_ had appeared, and seemed to chemists to
be unworthy of a reply.

It must be admitted that Lamarck was on this occasion unduly
self-opinionated and stubborn in adhering to such views at a time when
the physical sciences were being placed on a firm and lasting basis by
experimental philosophers. The two great lessons of science--to suspend
one's judgment and to wait for more light in theoretical matters on
which scientific men were so divided--and the necessity of adhering to
his own line of biological study, where he had facts of his own
observing on which to rest his opinions, Lamarck did not seem ever to
have learned.

The excuse for his rash and quixotic course in respect to his
physico-chemical vagaries is that he had great mental activity. Lamarck
was a synthetic philosopher. He had been brought up in the encyclopaedic
period of learning. He had from his early manhood been deeply interested
in physical subjects. In middle age he probably lived a very retired
life, did not mingle with his compeers or discuss his views with them.
So that when he came to publish them, he found not a single supporter.
His speculations were received in silence and not deemed worthy of
discussion.

A very just and discriminating judge of Lamarck's work, Professor
Cleland, thus refers to his writings on physics and chemistry:

"The most prominent defect in Lamarck must be admitted, quite apart
from all consideration of the famous hypothesis which bears his
name, to have been want of control in speculation. Doubtless the
speculative tendency furnished a powerful incentive to work, but it
outran the legitimate deductions from observation, and led him into
the production of volumes of worthless chemistry without
experimental basis, as well as into spending much time in fruitless
meteorological predictions." (_Encyc. Brit._, Art. LAMARCK.)

How a modern physicist regards Lamarck's views on physics may be seen by
the following statement kindly written for this book by Professor Carl
Barus of Brown University, Providence:

"Lamarck's physical and chemical speculations, made throughout on
the basis of the alchemistic philosophy of the time, will have
little further interest to-day than as evidence showing the broadly
philosophic tendencies of Lamarck's mind. Made without experiment
and without mathematics, the contents of the three volumes will
hardly repay perusal, except by the historian interested in certain
aspects of pre-Lavoisierian science. The temerity with which
physical phenomena are referred to occult static molecules,
permeated by subtle fluids, the whole mechanism left without dynamic
quality, since the mass of the molecule is to be non-essential, is
markedly in contrast with the discredit into which such hypotheses
have now fallen. It is true that an explanation of natural phenomena
in terms "le feu ethere, le feu calorique, et le feu fixe" might be
interpreted with reference to the modern doctrine of energy; but it
is certain that Lamarck, antedating Fresnel, Carnot, Ampere, not to
mention their great followers, had not the faintest inkling of the
possibility of such an interpretation. Indeed, one may readily
account for the resemblance to modern views, seeing that all
speculative systems of science must to some extent run in parallel,
inasmuch as they begin with the facts of common experience. Nor were
his speculations in any degree stimulating to theoretical science.
Many of his mechanisms in which the ether operates on a plane of
equality with the air can only be regarded with amusement. The whole
of his elaborate schemes of color classification may be instanced as
forerunners of the methods commercially in vogue to-day; they are
not the harbingers of methods scientifically in vogue. One looks in
vain for research adequate to carry the load of so much speculative
text.

"Even if we realize that the beginnings of science could but be made
amid such groping in the dark, it is a pity that a man of Lamarck's
genius, which seems to have been destitute of the instincts of an
experimentalist, should have lavished so much serious thought in
evolving a system of chemical physics out of himself."

The chemical status of Lamarck's writings is thus stated by Professor H.
Carrington Bolton in a letter dated Washington, D. C., February 9, 1900:

"Excuse delay in replying to your inquiry as to the chemical status
of the French naturalist, Lamarck. Not until this morning have I
found it convenient to go to the Library of Congress. That Library
has not the _Recherches_ nor the _Memoires_, but the position of
Lamarck is well known. He had no influence on chemistry, and his
name is not mentioned in the principal histories of chemistry. He
made no experiments, but depended upon his imagination for his
facts; he opposed the tenets of the new French school founded by
Lavoisier, and proposed a fanciful scheme of abstract principles
that remind one of alchemy.

"Cuvier, in his _Eloge_ (_Memoires Acad. Royale des Sciences_,
1832), estimates Lamarck correctly as respects his position in
physical science."

Lamarck boldly carried the principle of change and evolution into
inorganic nature by the same law of change of circumstances producing
change of species.

Under the head, "De l'espece parmi les mineraux," p. 149, the author
states that he had for a long time supposed that there were no species
among minerals. Here, also, he doubts, and boldly, if not rashly, in
this case, opposes accepted views, and in this field, as elsewhere,
shows, at least, his independence of thought.

"They teach in Paris," he says, "that the integrant molecule of each
kind of compound is invariable in nature, and consequently that it
is as old as nature, hence, mineral species are constant.

"For myself, I declare that I am persuaded, and even feel convinced,
that the integrant molecule of every compound substance whatever,
may change its nature, namely, may undergo changes in the number and
in the proportions of the principles which compose it."

He enlarges on this subject through eight pages. He was evidently led to
take this view from his assumption that everything, every natural
object, organic or inorganic, undergoes a change. But it may be
objected that this view will not apply to minerals, because those of the
archaean rocks do not differ, and have undergone no change since then to
the present time, unless we except such minerals as are alteration
products due to metamorphism. The primary laws of nature, of physics,
and of chemistry are unchangeable, while change, progression from the
generalized to the specialized, is distinctly characteristic of the
organic as opposed to the inorganic world.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] "On the Influence of the Moon on the Earth's Atmosphere," _Journal
de Physique_, prairial, l'an VI. (1798).

[59] Nature, Dec. 6, 1900.

CHAPTER VIII

LAMARCK'S WORK IN GEOLOGY

Whatever may be said of his chemical and physical lucubrations, Lamarck
in his geological and palaeontological writings is, despite their errors,
always suggestive, and in some most important respects in advance of his
time. And this largely for the reason that he had once travelled, and to
some extent observed geological phenomena, in the central regions of
France, in Germany, and Hungary; visiting mines and collecting ores and
minerals, besides being in a degree familiar with the French cretaceous
fossils, but more especially those of the tertiary strata of Paris and
its vicinity. He had, therefore, from his own experience, slight as it
was, some solid grounds of facts and observations on which to meditate
and from which to reason.

He did not attempt to touch upon cosmological theories--chaos and
creation--but, rather, confined himself to the earth, and more
particularly to the action of the ocean, and to the changes which he
believed to be due to organic agencies. The most impressive truth in
geology is the conception of the immensity of past time, and this truth
Lamarck fully realized. His views are to be found in a little book of
268 pages, entitled _Hydrogeologie_. It appeared in 1802 (an X.), or
ten years before the first publication of Cuvier's famous _Discours sur
les Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_ (1812). Written in his popular
and attractive style, and thoroughly in accord with the cosmological and
theological prepossessions of the age, the Discours was widely read, and
passed through many editions. On the other hand, the _Hydrogeologie_
died stillborn, with scarcely a friend or a reader, never reaching a
second edition, and is now, like most of his works, a bibliographical
rarity.

The only writer who has said a word in its favor, or contrasted it with
the work of Cuvier, is the judicious and candid Huxley, who, though by
no means favorable to Lamarck's factors of evolution, frankly said:

"The vast authority of Cuvier was employed in support of the
traditionally respectable hypotheses of special creation and of
catastrophism; and the wild speculations of the _Discours sur les
Revolutions de la Surface du Globe_ were held to be models of sound
scientific thinking, while the really much more sober and
philosophic hypotheses of the _Hydrogeologie_ were scouted."[60]

Before summarizing the contents of this book, let us glance at the
geological atmosphere--thin and tenuous as it was then--in which Lamarck
lived. The credit of being the first observer, before Steno (1669), to
state that fossils are the remains of animals which were once alive, is
due to an Italian, Frascatero, of Verona, who wrote in 1517.

"But," says Lyell,[61] "the clear and philosophical views of
Frascatero were disregarded, and the talent and argumentative powers
of the learned were doomed for three centuries to be wasted in the
discussion of these two simple and preliminary questions: First,
whether fossil remains had ever belonged to living creatures; and,
secondly, whether, if this be admitted, all the phenomena could not
be explained by the deluge of Noah."

Previous to this the great artist, architect, engineer, and musician,
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), who, among other great works, planned and
executed some navigable canals in Northern Italy, and who was an
observer of rare penetration and judgment, saw how fossil shells were
formed, saying that the mud of rivers had covered and penetrated into
the interior of fossil shells at a time when these were still at the
bottom of the sea near the coast.[62]

That versatile and observing genius, Bernard Palissy, as early as 1580,
in a book entitled _The Origin of Springs from Rain-water_, and in other
writings, criticized the notions of the time, especially of Italian
writers, that petrified shells had all been left by the universal
deluge.

"It has happened," said Fontenelle, in his eulogy on Palissy,
delivered before the French Academy a century and a half later,
"that a potter who knew neither Latin nor Greek dared, toward the
end of the sixteenth century, to say in Paris, and in the presence
of all the doctors, that fossil shells were veritable shells
deposited at some time by the sea in the places where they were
then found; that the animals had given to the figured stones all
their different shapes, and that he boldly defied all the school of
Aristotle to attack his proofs."[63]

Then succeeded, at the end of the seventeenth century, the forerunners
of modern geology: Steno (1669), Leibnitz (1683), Ray (1692), Woodward
(1695), Vallisneri (1721), while Moro published his views in 1745. In
the eighteenth century Reaumur[64] (1720) presented a paper on the
fossil shells of Touraine.

Cuvier[65] thus pays his respects, in at least an unsympathetic way, to
the geological essayists and compilers of the seventeenth century:

"The end of the seventeenth century lived to see the birth of a new
science, which took, in its infancy, the high-sounding name of
'Theory of the Earth.' Starting from a small number of facts, badly
observed, connecting them by fantastic suppositions, it pretended to
go back to the origin of worlds, to, as it were, play with them, and
to create their history. Its arbitrary methods, its pompous
language, altogether seemed to render it foreign to the other
sciences, and, indeed, the professional savants for a long time cast
it out of the circle of their studies."

Their views, often premature, composed of half-truths, were mingled with
glaring errors and fantastic misconceptions, but were none the less
germinal. Leibnitz was the first to propose the nebular hypothesis,
which was more fully elaborated by Kant and Laplace. Buffon, influenced
by the writing of Leibnitz, in his _Theorie de la Terre_, published in
1749, adopted his notion of an original volcanic nucleus and a universal
ocean, the latter as he thought leaving the land dry by draining into
subterranean caverns. He also dimly saw, or gathered from his reading,
that the mountains and valleys were due to secondary causes; that
fossiliferous strata had been deposited by ocean currents, and that
rivers had transported materials from the highlands to the lowlands. He
also states that many of the fossil shells which occur in Europe do not
live in the adjacent seas, and that there are remains of fishes and of
plants not now living in Europe, and which are either extinct or live in
more southern climates, and others in tropical seas. Also that the bones
and teeth of elephants and of the rhinoceros and hippopotamus found in
Siberia and elsewhere in northern Europe and Asia indicate that these
animals must have lived there, though at present restricted to the
tropics. In his last essay, _Epoques de la Nature_ (1778), he claims
that the earth's history may be divided into epochs, from the earliest
to the present time. The first epoch was that of fluidity, of
incandescence, when the earth and the planets assumed their form; the
second, of cooling; the third, when the waters covered the earth, and
volcanoes began to be active; the fourth, that of the retreat of the
seas, and the fifth the age when the elephants, the hippopotamus, and
other southern animals lived in the regions of the north; the sixth,
when the two continents, America and the old world, became separate; the
seventh and last being the age of man. Above all, by his attractive
style and bold suggestions he popularized the subjects and created an
interest in these matters and a spirit of inquiry which spread
throughout France and the rest of Europe.

But notwithstanding the crude and uncritical nature of the writings of
the second half of the eighteenth century, resulting from the lack of
that more careful and detailed observation which characterizes our day,
there was during this period a widespread interest in physical and
natural science, and it led up to that more exact study of nature which
signalizes the nineteenth century. "More new truths concerning the
external world," says Buckle, "were discovered in France during the
latter half of the eighteenth century than during all preceding periods
put together."[66] As Perkins[67] says: "Interest in scientific study,
as in political investigation, seemed to rise suddenly from almost
complete inactivity to extraordinary development. In both departments
English thinkers had led the way, but if the impulse to such
investigations came from without, the work done in France in every
branch of scientific research during the eighteenth century was excelled
by no other nation, and England alone could assert any claim to results
of equal importance. The researches of Coulomb in electricity, of Buffon
in geology, of Lavoisier in chemistry, of Daubenton in comparative
anatomy, carried still farther by their illustrious successors towards
the close of the century, did much to establish conceptions of the
universe and its laws upon a scientific basis." And not only did
Rousseau make botany fashionable, but Goldsmith wrote from Paris in
1755: "I have seen as bright a circle of beauty at the chemical lectures
of Rouelle as gracing the court of Versailles." Petit lectured on
astronomy to crowded houses, and among his listeners were gentlemen and
ladies of fashion, as well as professional students.[68] The
popularizers of science during this period were Voltaire, Montesquieu,
Alembert, Diderot, and other encyclopaedists.

Here should be mentioned one of Buffon's contemporaries and countrymen;
one who was the first true field geologist, an observer rather than a
compiler or theorist. This was Jean E. Guettard (1715-1786). He
published, says Sir Archibald Geikie, in his valuable work, _The
Founders of Geology_, about two hundred papers on a wide range of
scientific subjects, besides half a dozen quarto volumes of his
observations, together with many excellent plates. Geikie also states
that he is undoubtedly entitled to rank among the first great pioneers
of modern geology. He was the first (1751) to make a geological map of
northern France, and roughly traced the limits of his three bands or
formations from France across the southeastern English counties. In his
work on "The degradation of mountains effected in our time by heavy
rains, rivers, and the sea,"[69] he states that the sea is the most
potent destroyer of the land, and that the material thus removed is
deposited either on the land or along the shores of the sea. He thought
that the levels of the valleys are at present being raised, owing to the
deposit of detritus in them. He points out that the deposits laid down
by the ocean do not extend far out to sea, "that consequently the
elevations of new mountains in the sea, by the deposition of sediment,
is a process very difficult to conceive; that the transport of the
sediment as far as the equator is not less improbable; and that still
more difficult to accept is the suggestion that the sediment from our
continent is carried into the seas of the New World. In short, we are
still very little advanced towards the theory of the earth as it now
exists." Guettard was the first to discover the volcanoes of Auvergne,
but he was "hopelessly wrong" in regard to the origin of basalt,
forestalling Werner in his mistakes as to its aqueous origin. He was
thus the first Neptunist, while, as Geikie states, his "observations in
Auvergne practically started the Vulcanist camp."

We now come to Lamarck's own time. He must have been familiar with the
results of Pallas's travels in Russia and Siberia (1793-94). The
distinguished German zooelogist and geologist, besides working out the
geology of the Ural Mountains, showed, in 1777, that there was a general
law in the formation of all mountain chains composed chiefly of primary
rocks;[70] the granitic axis being flanked by schists, and these by
fossiliferous strata. From his observations made on the Volga and about
its mouth, he presented proofs of the former extension, in comparatively
recent times, of the Caspian Sea. But still more pregnant and remarkable
was his discovery of an entire rhinoceros, with its flesh and skin, in
the frozen soil of Siberia. His memoir on this animal places him among
the forerunners of, if not within the ranks of, the founders of
palaeontology.

Meanwhile Soldani, an Italian, had, in 1780, shown that the limestone
strata of Italy had accumulated in a deep sea, at least far from land,
and he was the first to observe the alternation of marine and
fresh-water strata in the Paris basin.

Lamarck must have taken much interest in the famous controversy between
the Vulcanists and Neptunists. He visited Freyburg in 1771; whether he
met Werner is not known, as Werner began to lecture in 1775. He must
have personally known Faujas of Paris, who, in 1779, published his
description of the volcanoes of Vivarais and Velay; while Desmarest's
(1725-1815) elaborate work on the volcanoes of Auvergne, published in
1774, in which he proved the igneous origin of basalt, was the best
piece of geological exploration which had yet been accomplished, and is
still a classic.[71]

Werner (1750-1817), the propounder of the Neptunian theory, was one of
the founders of modern geology and of palaeontology. His work entitled
_Ueber die auessern Kennzeichen der Fossilien_ appeared in 1774; his
_Kurze Klassifikation und Beschreibung der Gebirgsarten_ in 1787. He
discovered the law of the superposition of stratified rocks, though he
wrongly considered volcanic rocks, such as basalt, to be of aqueous
origin, being as he supposed formed of chemical precipitates from water.
But he was the first to state that the age of different formations can
be told by their fossils, certain species being confined to particular
beds, while others ranged throughout whole formations, and others seemed
to occur in several different formations; "the original species found in
these formations appearing to have been so constituted as to live
through a variety of changes which had destroyed hundreds of other
species which we find confined to particular beds."[72] His views as
regards fossils, as Jameson states, were probably not known to Cuvier,
and it is more than doubtful whether Lamarck knew of them. He observed
that fossils appear first in "transition" or palaeozoic strata, and were
mainly corals and molluscs; that in the older carboniferous rocks the
fossils are of higher types, such as fish and amphibious animals; while
in the tertiary or alluvial strata occur the remains of birds and
quadrupeds. He thought that marine plants were more ancient than land
plants. His studies led him to infer that the fossils contained in the
oldest rocks are very different from any of the species of the present
time; that the newer the formation, the more do the remains approach in
form to the organic beings of the present creation, and that in the
very latest formations, fossil remains of species now existing occur.
Such advanced views as these would seem to entitle Werner to rank as one
of the founders of palaeontology.[73]

Hutton's _Theory of the Earth_ appeared in 1785, and in a more developed
state, as a separate work, in 1795.[74] "The ruins of an older world,"
he said, "are visible in the present structure of our planet, and the
strata which now compose our continents have been once beneath the sea,
and were formed out of the waste of preexisting continents. The same
forces are still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechanical
violence, even the hardest rocks, and transporting the materials to the
sea, where they are spread out and form strata analogous to those of
more ancient date. Although loosely deposited along the bottom of the
ocean, they became afterwards altered and consolidated by volcanic heat,
and were then heaved up, fractured, and contorted." Again he said: "In
the economy of the world I can find no traces of a beginning, no
prospect of an end." As Lyell remarks: "Hutton imagined that the
continents were first gradually destroyed by aqueous degradation, and
when their ruins had furnished materials for new continents, they were
upheaved by violent convulsions. He therefore required alternate periods
of general disturbance and repose."

To Hutton, therefore, we are indebted for the idea of the immensity of
the duration of time. He was the forerunner of Lyell and of the
uniformitarian school of geologists.

Hutton observed that fossils characterized certain strata, but the value
of fossils as time-marks and the principle of the superposition of
stratified fossiliferous rocks were still more clearly established by
William Smith, an English surveyor, in 1790. Meanwhile the Abbe Hauey,
the founder of crystallography, was in 1802 Professor of Mineralogy in
the Jardin des Plantes.

_Lamarck's Contributions to Physical Geology; his Theory of the Earth._

Such were the amount and kind of knowledge regarding the origin and
structure of our earth which existed at the close of the eighteenth
century, while Lamarck was meditating his _Hydrogeologie_, and had begun
to study the invertebrate fossils of the Paris tertiary basin.

His object, he says in his work, is to present certain considerations
which he believed to be new and of the first order, which had escaped
the notice of physicists, and which seemed to him should serve as the
foundations for a good theory of the earth. His theses are:

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