Edwin Ray Lankester

“ The early collectors of natural curiosities were the founders of zoological science, and to this day the naturalist traveller and his correlative, the museum curator and systematists, play a most important part in the progress of zoology. Indeed, the historical and present importance of this aspect or branch of zoological science is so great that the name “zoology” has until recently been associated entirely with it, to the exclusion of the study of minute anatomical structure and function which have been distinguished as anatomy and physiology. ”

“ It is one of Darwin’s great merits to have made use of these observations and to have formulated their results to a large extent as the laws of variation and heredity. As the breeder selects a congenital variation which suits his requirements, and by breeding from the animals (or plants) exhibiting that variation obtains a new breed specially characterized by that variation, so in nature is there a selection amongst all the congenital variations of each generation of a species. ”

“ Apart from his special discoveries in the anatomy of plants and animals, and his descriptions of new species, the great merit of Linnaeus was his introduction of a method of enumeration and classification which may be said to have created systematic zoology and botany in their present form, and establishes his name for ever as the great organizer, the man who recognized a great practical want in the use of language and supplied it. ”

“ Thus mysticism was finally banished from the domain of biology, and zoology became one of the physical sciences—the science which seeks to arrange and discuss the phenomena of animal life and form, as the outcome of the operation of the laws of physics and chemistry.
A subdivision of zoology which was at one time in favour is simply into morphology and physiology, the study of form and structure on the one hand, and the study of the activities and functions of the forms and structures on the other. ”

“ Darwin may be said to have founded the science of bionomics, and at the same time to have given new stimulus and new direction to morphography, physiology, and plasmology, by uniting them as contributories to one common biological doctrine—the doctrine of organic evolution—itself but a part of the wider doctrine of universal evolution based on the laws of physics and chemistry. ”

“ Education is not in its essential nature a training administered to the young by an older generation, but is the natural and unaided assimilation of the Record of the Past by the automatically educable brain—an assimilation which is always in all races very large but becomes far larger in civilized communities. ”

“ The wave of morphological speculation, with its outcome of new systems and new theories of classification (see Agassiz, Essay on Classification, 1859) , which were as numerous as the professors of zoological science, was necessarily succeeded in the true progress of the science by a period of minuter study in which the microscope, the discovery of embryological histories, and the all-important cell-theory came to swell the stream of exact knowledge. ”

“ This climax was reached at the very moment when Darwin was publishing the Origin of Species (1859) , by which universal opinion has been brought to the position that species, as well as genera, orders and classes, are the subjective expressions of a vast ramifying pedigree in which the only objective existences are individuals, the apparent species as well as higher groups being marked out, not by any distributive law, but by the interaction of living matter and its physical environment, causing the persistence of some forms and the destruction of vast series of ancestral intermediate kinds. ”

“ We now arrive at the period when the doctrine of organic evolution was established by Darwin, and when naturalists, being convinced by him as they had not been by the transmutationists of fifty years’ earlier date, were compelled to take an entirely new view of the significance of all attempts at framing a “natural” classification. ”

“ A result of the very greatest importance arising from the application of the generalizations of Darwinism to human development and to the actual phase of existing human population is that education has no direct effect upon the mental or physical features of the race or stock: it can only affect those of the individual. Educability, defects or excellences, or peculiarities of mind or body, can be handed on from parent to offspring by protoplasmic continuity in reproduction. ”

“ Both innate and superimposed variations are capable of division into those which are more and those which are less obvious to the human eye. Scarcely perceptible variations of the innate class are regularly and invariably present in every new generation of every species of living thing. Their greatness or smallness so far as human perception goes is not of much significance; their real importance in regard to the origin of new species depends on whether they are of value to the organism and therefore capable of selection in the struggle for existence. ”

“ The facts of the relationships of animals to one another, which had been treated as the outcome of an inscrutable law by most zoologists and glibly explained by the transcendental morphologists, were amongst the most powerful arguments in support of Darwin’s theory, since they, together with all other vital phenomena, received a sufficient explanation through it. ”

“ The later stages of evolution leading from his ape-like ancestors to man have consisted definitely in the acquirement of a larger and therefore more educable brain by man and in the consequent education of that brain. A new and most important feature in organic development makes its appearance when we set out the facts of man’s evolutional history. It amounts to a new and unprecedented factor in organic development, external to the organism and yet produced by the activity of the organism upon which it permanently reacts. ”

“ The perfecting of the microscope led to a full comprehension of the great doctrine of cell-structure and the establishment of the facts— (1) that all organisms are either single corpuscles (so-called cells) of living material (microscopic animalcules, &c.) or are built up of an immense number of such units; (2) that all organisms begin their individual existence as a single unit or corpuscle of living substance, which multiplies by binary fission, the products growing in size and multiplying similarly by binary fission ”

“ The result is the creation of an almost inconceivably vast body of traditional custom, law and knowledge into which every human being is born, less in the more isolated and barbarous communities, but large everywhere. ”

“ But it must not be forgotten that the problems presented by human communities are extremely complex, and that the absence of any selection of healthy or desirable stock in the breeding of human communities leads to undesirable consequences. The most thrifty and capable sections of the people at the present day are not (it has been shown) in overcrowded areas, producing offspring at such a rate as to contribute to the increase of the population. ”

“ Aptitudes and want of aptitude, which are innate and constitutional, are transmitted to offspring, but not the results of experience, education and training. Blemishes in the stock, defects of mind or body, though they may be to some extent corrected in the individual by training, cannot be got rid of from the stock by any such process. A defective stock, if allowed to breed, will perpetuate its defects, in spite of the concealment of those defects in an individual by training or other treatment. ”

“ But the results of education cannot be so handed on. The educated man who has acquired new experiences, new knowledge, can place these on the great Record for the benefit of future generations of men, but he cannot bodily transmit his acquirements to his offspring. Were acquired (superimposed) characters really transmissible by breeding, then every child born would inherit, more or less completely, the knowledge acquired by both its parents. ”

“ This selection depends on the fact that more young are born than the natural provision of food will support. In consequence of this excess of births there is a struggle for existence and a survival of the fittest, and consequently an ever-present necessarily acting selection, which either maintains accurately the form of the species from generation to generation or leads to its modification in correspondence with changes in the surrounding circumstances which have relation to its fitness for success in the struggle for life. ”

“ Lamarck had put forward the hypothesis that structural alterations acquired by (that is to say, superimposed upon) a parent in the course of its life are transmitted to the offspring, and that, as these structural alterations are acquired by an animal or plant in consequence of the direct action of the environment, the offspring inheriting them would as a consequence not unfrequently start with a greater fitness for those conditions than its parents started with. ”

“ Hence many structures which are obvious to the eye, and serves as distinguishing marks of separate species, are really not themselves of value or use, but are the necessary concomitants of less obvious and even altogether obscure qualities, which are the real characters upon which selection is acting. Such “correlated variations” may attain to great size and complexity without being of use. ”

“ Lamarck, Treviranus, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Saint-Hilaire preached to deaf ears, for they advanced the theory that living beings had developed by a stow process of transmutation in successive generations from simpler ancestors, and in the beginning from simplest formless matter, without being able to demonstrate any existing mechanical causes by which such development must necessarily be brought about. ”

“ The fact that in the formation of the reproductive cells of the hybrid generation the material which carries the positive quality is not subdivided so as to give a half-quantity to each reproductive cell, but on the contrary is apparently distributed as an undivided whole to half only of the reproductive cells and not at all to the remainder, is the important inference from Mendel’s experiments. ”

“ The Fifth Law, relating also to the independence of the meromes as compared with the whole somite, is the law of autorhythmus of the meromes. Metamerism does not always manifest itself in the formation of complete new segments; but one merome may be repeated so as to suggest several metameres, whilst the remaining meromes are, so to speak, out of harmony with it and exhibit no repetition. Thus in the hinder somites of the body of Apus the Crustacean we find a series of segments corresponding apparently each to a complete single somite ”

“ A natural selection would thus be effected. In every succeeding generation this would be the case, and even those with weak but still seeing eyes would in the course of time escape, until only a pure race of eyeless or blind animals would be left in the cavern or deep sea. ”

“ The view that instinct is the hereditarily fixed result of habit derived from experience long dominated all inquiry into the subject, but we may now expect to see a renewed and careful study of animal instincts carried out with the view of testing the applicability to each instance of the pure Darwinian theory without the aid of Lamarckism. ”

“ The most instructive classification of the “variations” exhibited by fully formed organisms consists in the separation in the first place of those which arise from antecedent congenital, innate, constitutional or germinal variations from those which arise merely from the operation of variation of the environment or the food-supply upon normally constituted individuals. ”

“ The advantage to the animal of this imitation of surrounding objects is that it escapes the pursuit of (say) a bird which would, were it not deceived by the resemblance, attack and eat the caterpillar. Now it is clear that preceding generations of caterpillars cannot have acquired this habit of posturing by experience. Either the caterpillar postures and escapes, or it does not posture and is eaten; it is not half eaten and allowed to profit by experience. ”

“ By it a new heredity, free from the limitations of protoplasmic continuity, is established. Its first beginnings are seen in the imitative tendencies of animals by which the young of one generation acquire some of the habits of their parents, and by which gregarious and social animals acquire a community of procedure ensuring the advantage of the group. “Taboo,” the systematic imposition by the community of restrictions upon the conduct of the individual, is one of its earliest manifestations in primitive man and can be observed even in animal communities. ”

“ It is definitely ascertained that many animals are thus born with distorted or defective eyes whose parents have not had their eyes submitted to any peculiar conditions. Supposing a number of some species of arthropod or fish to be swept into a cavern or to be carried from less to greater depths in the sea, those individuals with perfect eyes would follow the glimmer of light and eventually escape to the outer air or the shallower depths, leaving behind those with imperfect eyes to breed in the dark place. ”