the organic worlds,
from minerals to plants, from plants to polyps (our Infusoria), polyps
to worms, and so on to the higher animals. He, on the contrary, affirms
that nature makes leaps, that there is a wide gap between minerals and
living bodies, that everything is not gradated and shaded into each
other. One reason for this was possibly his strange view, expressed in
1794, that all brute bodies and inorganic matters, even granite, were
not formed at the same epoch but at different times, and were derived
from organisms.[115]

The mystical doctrine of a vital force was rife in Lamarck's time. The
chief starting point of the doctrine was due to Haller, and, as Verworn
states, it is a doctrine which has confused all physiology down to the
middle of the present century, and even now emerges again here and there
in varied form.[116]

Lamarck was not a vitalist. Life, he says,[117] is usually supposed to
be a particular being or entity; a sort of principle whose nature is
unknown, and which possesses living bodies. This notion he denies as
absurd, saying that life is a very natural phenomenon, a physical fact;
in truth a little complicated in its principles, but not in any sense a
particular or special being or entity.

He then defines life in the following words: "Life is an order and a
state of things in the parts of every body possessing it, which permits
or renders possible in it the execution of organic movement, and which,
so long as it exists, is effectively opposed to death. Derange this
order and this state of things to the point of preventing the execution
of organic movement, or the possibility of its reestablishment, then you
cause death." Afterwards, in the _Philosophie zoologique_, he modifies
this definition, which reads thus: "Life, in the parts of a body which
possesses it, is an order and a state of things which permit organic
movements; and these movements, which constitute active life, result
from the action of a stimulating cause which excites them."[118]

For the science of all living bodies Lamarck proposed the word
"Biology," which is so convenient a term at the present day. The word
first appears in the preface to the _Hydrogeologie_, published in 1802.
It is worthy of note that in the same year the same word was proposed
for the same science by G. R. Treviranus as the title of a work,
_Biologie, der Philosophie der lebenden Natur_, published in 1802-1805
(vols. i.-vi., 1802-1822), the first v