service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the
organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and
not of miraculous interposition. Lamarck seems to have been chiefly led to
his conclusion on the gradual change of species, by the difficulty of
distinguishing species and varieties, by the almost perfect gradation of
forms in certain groups, and by the analogy of domestic productions. With
respect to the means of modification, he attributed something to the direct
action of the physical conditions of life, something to the crossing of
already existing forms, and much to use and disuse, that is, to the effects
of habit. To this latter agency he seems to attribute all the beautiful
adaptations in nature; such as the long neck of the giraffe for browsing on
the branches of trees. But he likewise believed in a law of progressive
development, and as all the forms of life thus tend to progress, in order
to account for the existence at the present day of simple productions, he
maintains that such forms are now spontaneously generated. (I have taken
the date of the first publication of Lamarck from Isidore Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire's ("Hist. Nat. Generale", tom. ii. page 405, 1859) excellent
history of opinion on this subject. In this work a full account is given
of Buffon's conclusions on the same subject. It is curious how largely my
grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, anticipated the views and erroneous
grounds of opinion of Lamarck in his "Zoonomia" (vol. i. pages 500-510),
published in 1794. According to Isid. Geoffroy there is no doubt that
Goethe was an extreme partisan of similar views, as shown in the
introduction to a work written in 1794 and 1795, but not published till
long afterward; he has pointedly remarked ("Goethe als Naturforscher", von
Dr. Karl Meding, s. 34) that the future question for naturalists will be
how, for instance, cattle got their horns and not for what they are used.
It is rather a singular instance of the manner in which similar views arise
at about the same time, that Goethe in Germany, Dr. Darwin in England, and
Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (as we shall immediately see) in France, came to the