Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

“ This striking personage in the history of biological science, who has made such an ineffaceable impression on the philosophy of biology, certainly demands more than a brief éloge to keep alive his memory.
Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, was born August 1, 1744, at Bazentin-le-Petit. This little village is situated in Picardy, or what is now the Department of the Somme, in the Arrondissement de Péronne, Canton d’Albert, a little more than four miles from Albert, between this town and Bapaume, and near Longueval, the nearest post-office to Bazentin. ”

“ A volume of plates of the fossil shells of the neighbourhood of Paris was collected in 1823 from his memoirs in the Annales des Muséums. He died on the 18th of December 1829.
The character of Lamarck as a naturalist is remarkable alike for its excellences and its defects. His excellences were width of scope, fertility of ideas and a pre-eminent faculty of precise description, arising not only from a singularly terse style, but from a clear insight into both the distinctive features and the resemblances of forms. ”

“ That he stated the theory of descent with much clearness, and with a sufficient background of actual knowledge of forms, must be acknowledged by all; the only difficulty relates to the question of priority. The first volume of his biology was published in 1802, but he states that this had been written about 1796. Now it was not till 1801 that Lamarck first began to free himself from the traditional dogma of the immutability of species, and to publish his views of evolution. ”

“ With opinions having such a decided tendency to materialism, it is not surprising that Lamarck seldom makes allusion to a Deity, and when he does so, he nearly confines himself to the bare acknowledgment of his existence. In his earlier works, there is no mention made of a Supreme Being whatever; and even when his existence is admitted, He is divested of the attributes which belong to him. The glory of forming the works of creation, in which His beneficence and power are so signally manifested, is ascribed to nature, or a certain order of things. ”

“ The popular idea of Lamarckism, and which from the first has been prejudicial to his views, is that an animal may acquire an organ by simply wishing for or desiring it, or, as his French critics put it, “Un animal finit toujours par posséder un organe quand il le veut.” “Such,” says Perrier, [251] “is not the idea of Lamarck, who simply attributes the transformations of species to the stimulating action of external conditions, construing it under the expression of wants (besoins) , and explaining by that word what we now call adaptations. ”

“ Of Lamarck’s parentage and ancestry there are fortunately some traces. In the Registre aux Actes de Baptême pour l’Année 1702, still preserved in the mairie of Bazentin-le-Petit, the record shows that his father was born in February, 1702, at Bazentin. The infant was baptised February 16, 1702, the permission to the curé by Henry, Bishop of Amiens, having been signed February 3, 1702. Lamarck’s grandparents were, according to this certificate of baptism, Messire Philippe de Monet de Lamarck, Ecuyer, Seigneur des Bazentin, and Dame Magdeleine de Lyonne. ”

“ Whatever may be the general conclusion as to the claim of Lamarck being "the founder of evolution," there can be no possible doubt as to his life being the "old, old story of a man of genius who lived far in advance of his age, and who died comparatively unappreciated and neglected." ”

“ Even in his humble position as keeper of the herbarium, with its pitiable compensation, Lamarck, now an eminent botanist, with a European reputation, was by no means appreciated or secure in his position. He was subjected to many worries, and, already married and with several children, suffered from a grinding poverty. His friend and supporter, La Billarderie, was a courtier, with much influence at the Tuileries, but as Intendant of the Royal Garden without the least claim to scientific fitness for the position ”

“ The forms of scientific error change rapidly; only the principle always remains. But this principle requires to be clothed from time to time in new garments, which rejuvenate and disguise it. The system of Lamarck, for a moment popular on account of the philosophic ideas to which it gave support, could not maintain itself in lasting honor in science. ”

“ The family of Lamarck, as stated by H. Masson, [3] notwithstanding his northern and almost Germanic name of Chevalier de Lamarck, originated in the southwest of France. Though born at Bazentin, in old Picardy, it is not less true that he descended on the paternal side from an ancient house of Béarn, whose patrimony was very modest. This house was that of Monet.
Another genealogist, Baron C. de Cauna, [4] tells us that there is no doubt that the family of Monet in Bigorre [5] was divided. One of its representatives formed a branch in Picardy in the reign of Louis XIV. or later. ”

“ That the present volume may vindicate his reputation and lead to a more impartial estimate of the work of this truly great naturalist and admirable man, may confidently be predicted; as even those who differ from Lamarck's conception of environmental and dynamic factors in evolution must feel obliged to recognize much in other phases of his philosophy which now forms the common property of science, but which Lamarck was among the first to advance and which he maintained steadily, in spite of ridicule and incredulity, to the end of his days. ”

“ Met by the ridicule and unfriendly criticisms of the 'creationists,' which were the more generally accepted on account of the modesty, retiring disposition and aversion to controversy of Lamarck himself, handicapped by the blindness and poverty of his later years, his views have been little known in their true shape, and the majority of naturalists have been content to receive them in the garbled form in which they were presented by those who rejected them. ”

“ In 1788 he visited Paris, where he formed a friendship with many individuals of similar tastes with himself, of whom the most eminent were Fabricius, Olivier, and Bosc, afterwards his associates in the Academy of Sciences. The presentation of a few rare flowers to M. Lamarck was the means of introducing him to that eminent naturalist, and the warmest friendship ever after subsisted between them; so much so, indeed, that Latreille was in the habit of calling Lamarck his adopted father. ”

“ With keen insight he realised that conscious intelligence counts for little in evolution, and focussed attention upon the unconscious but obscurely psychical processes of instinct and morphogenesis.
Not without reason have the later schools of evolutionary thought, who developed the psychological and vitalistic side of his doctrine, called themselves Neo-Lamarckians.
We shall say then that Lamarck, in spite of his materialism, was the founder of the "psychological" theory of evolution. ”

“ Packard has now written the book which was wanted, and will for long remain the only biography of Lamarck, and the best defence of Lamarckism. We will conclude with the words of the author: "We are all of us evolutionists, though we may differ as to the nature of the efficient causes." And may we not add that Lamarck preceded Darwin, as Erasmus did Luther? ”

“ It is a very unusual occurrence for a man to take up a new subject after he is fifty years of age, and to become a master in it. But Lamarck did this. It is true that his previous training as a botanist had prepared him, and it is also true that his years of solitude and poverty had given him a singularly placid and meditative mind, and this was strengthened by his natural courage. Had Lamarck been a descriptive zoologist only, he would have been great ”

“ In view of recognized facts, it is impossible to ascribe the origin of all the valleys to the wear of the waters. Just as Lamarck's conclusions in the science of organic beings, which he knew so well, were sharp-sighted and prophetic, so were they, in the sciences which were strange to him, careless, hazardous, and destined to be contradicted in the future. ”

“ 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 Hydrogéologie. 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) . ”

“ Adopts Natural Science.—An injury to the glands of the neck, resulting from being lifted by the head in sport by one of his comrades, unfitted him for military life, and he went to Paris and began the study of medicine, supporting himself in the mean time by working as a bank clerk. It was in his medical course of four years' severe study that Lamarck received the exact training that was needed to convert his enthusiastic love for science into the working powers of an investigator. ”

“ Indeed, his book is an assemblage of all that is most venturous and most fanciful in modern speculation, in which the most conspicuous place is allotted to a modification of Lamarck's theory on the development of animal life.
The charge of an atheistic tendency, as it is the heaviest which can be made against a work, so it is the last which ought to be hazarded without sufficient cause. In general, owing to the very sacredness of the subject, we feel disposed, in all suspicious cases, to pass over in silence both accusation and defence ”

“ A just estimate of Lamarck’s merits, will entitle him to occupy a high place among modern naturalists. Endowed by nature with varied and vigorous mental powers, he was fitted to excel in many branches of knowledge, and never failed to strike out a new path in every department to which he attached himself. ”

“ Lamarck was at least a natural philosopher far before his time, with the accidents of wealth, leisure, and powerful support absent from his career, which was pursued among many carping cares—an evolutionary Milton, with the last ten years of his life passed in darkness. ”

“ These were Bruguière the conchologist and Olivier the entomologist. In Germany Hermann was the leading systematic zoölogist. We would not forget the labors of the great German anatomist and physiologist Blumenbach, who was also the founder of anthropology; nor the German anatomists Tiedemann, Bojanus, and Carus; nor the embryologist Döllinger. But Lamarck’s method and point of view were of a new order—he was much more than a mere systematist. His work in systematic zoölogy, unlike that of Linné, and especially of Cuvier, was that of a far higher grade. ”

“ Either the sentiment intérieur is a psychological faculty, or it is nothing.
There is no doubt that, as expressed by Lamarck, the conception conceals a radical confusion of thought. It is not possible to be a thorough-going materialist, and at the 226same time to believe that new organs are formed in direct response to needs felt by the organism. Lamarck could never resolve this antinomy, and his speculations were thrown into confusion by it. ”

“ He probably was lacking in executive force, or in the art which Cuvier knew so well to practise, of enlisting young men to do the drudgery or render material aid, and then, in some cases, neglecting to give them proper credit.
The first memoir or paper published on a zoölogical subject by Lamarck was a modest one on shells, which appeared in 1792 in the Journal d’Histoire naturelle, the editors of which were Lamarck, Bruguière, Olivier, Haüy, and Pelletier. This paper was a review of an excellent memoir by Bruguière, who preceded Lamarck in the work of dismemberment of the Linnæan genera. ”

“ Lamarck, like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, was a believer in the theory of evolution, which was opposed by Cuvier.
Lamarck turned from the study of Meteorology to that of Botany, and later again to that of Zoology. In 1793 he became professor of the natural history of the lower classes of animals in the Jardin des Plantes. His theories have greatly influenced modern science, particularly that of the “Variation of Species,” which was set forth in his Philosophie Zoologique (two vols., Paris, 1809) and other works. ”

“ Lamarck was one of the best naturalists of his time, when geniuses abounded. His work was the first well-marked step toward a natural system as opposed to the formalities of Linné. He owed something to Cuvier, yet he knew how to utilize the work in anatomy offered by Cuvier in making a natural classification. ”

“ Every science must begin with the knowledge of facts and phenomena. When these are numerous enough, a partial generalization is possible; as they increase, the basis grows broader; but systems which can justly claim to be absolute and definitive can never be, for they presuppose that all the phenomena and facts are known, a condition which will be impossible as long as man lives. In the beginning of this century geology did not exist, and little was known of the matters of which it treats; but systems were created that included the whole earth. Lamarck elaborated his system in 1802 ”

“ Lamarck, it is true, admits that observation cannot demonstrate the producing power which he attributes to want; but if a direct proof is wanting, he considers an indirect proof sufficient by appealing to custom. What does he mean? Habit can develop and fortify existing organs by an appropriate and sustained exercise ”

“ In 1818 he began to discuss philosophical anatomy, the doctrine of homologies; he also studied the embryology of the mammals, and was the founder of teratology. It was he who discovered the vestigial teeth of the baleen whale and those of embryo birds, and the bearing of this on the doctrine of descent must have been obvious to him.
As early as 1795, before Lamarck had changed his views as to the stability of species, the young Geoffroy, then twenty-three years old, dared to claim that species may be only “les diverses dégénérations d’un même type.” ”