distinguished French naturalist, Quatrefages, although he was not
himself an evolutionist, has protested against the way Lamarck's views
have been caricatured. By nearly all authors he is represented as
claiming that by simply "willing" or "desiring" the individual bird or
other animal radically and with more or less rapidity changed its shape
or that of some particular organ or part of the body. This is, as we
have seen, by no means what he states. In no instance does he speak of
an animal as simply "desiring" to modify an organ in any way. The
doctrine of appetency attributed to Lamarck is without foundation. In
all the examples given he intimates that owing to changes in
environment, leading to isolation in a new area separating a large
number of individuals from their accustomed habitat, they are driven by
necessity (_besoin_) or new needs to adopt a new or different mode of
life--new habits. These efforts, whatever they may be--such as attempts
to fly, swim, wade, climb, burrow, etc., continued for a long time "in
all the individuals of its species," or the great number forced by
competition to migrate and become segregated from the others of the
original species--finally, owing to the changed surroundings, affect the
mass of individuals thus isolated, and their organs thus exercised in a
special direction undergo a slow modification.

Even so careful a writer as Dr. Alfred R. Wallace does not quite fairly,
or with exactness, state what Lamarck says, when in his classical essay
of 1858 he represents Lamarck as stating that the giraffe acquired its
long neck by _desiring_ to reach the foliage of the more lofty shrubs,
and constantly stretching its neck for the purpose. On the contrary, he
does not use the word "desiring" at all. What Lamarck does say is that--

"The giraffe lives in dry, desert places, without herbage, so that
it is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees, and is continually
forced to reach up to them. It results from this habit, continued
for a long time in all the individuals of its species, that its fore
limbs have become so elongated that the giraffe, without raising
itself erect on its hind legs, raises its head and reaches six
meters high (almost twenty feet)."[192]

We submit that this mode of evolution of the giraffe is quite as
reasonable as the very hypothetical one advanced by Mr. Wallace;[193]
_i.e._, that a variety occurred with a longer neck than usual, and these
"at