his views formed without
reference to experiments, although Lavoisier, by his discovery of oxygen
in the years 1772-85, and other researches, had laid the foundations of
the antiphlogistic or modern chemistry, Lamarck quixotically attempted
to substitute his own speculative views for those of the discoverers of
oxygen--Priestley (1774) and the great French chemist Lavoisier.
Lamarck, in his _Hydrogeologie_ (1802), went so far as to declare:

"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 specu