that work, whatever might be said for it in 1809, was miserably
below the level of the knowledge of half a century later. In
that interval of time the elucidation of the structure of the
lower animals and plants had given rise to wholly new conceptions
of their relations; histology and embryology, in the modern
sense, had been created; physiology had been reconstituted; the
facts of distribution, geological and geographical, had been
prodigiously multiplied and reduced to order. To any biologist
whose studies had carried him beyond mere species-mongering in
1850, one-half of Lamarck's arguments were obsolete and the other
half erroneous, or defective, in virtue of omitting to deal with
the various classes of evidence which had been brought to light
since his time. Moreover his one suggestion as to the cause of
the gradual modification of species--effort excited by change of
conditions--was, on the face of it, inapplicable to the whole
vegetable world. I do not think that any impartial judge who
reads the 'Philosophie Zoologique' now, and who afterwards takes
up Lyell's trenchant and effectual criticism (published as far
back as 1830), will be disposed to allot to Lamarck a much higher
place in the establishment of biological evolution than that
which Bacon assigns to himself in relation to physical science
generally,--buccinator tantum. (Erasmus Darwin first promulgated
Lamarck's fundamental conceptions, and, with greater logical
consistency, he had applied them to plants. But the advocates of
his claims have failed to show that he, in any respect,
anticipated the central idea of the 'Origin of Species.')

But, by a curious irony of fate, the same influence which led me
to put as little faith in modern speculations on this subject, as
in the venerable traditions recorded in the first two chapters of