l changes produced by
use and disuse. Lamarck's work did not become at all popular while he
lived, chiefly through the overpowering influence of Baron Cuvier, who
had an equally fantastic scheme of his own, which may well be termed a
burlesque on Creation and in which an extreme fixity of "species" was a
cardinal doctrine. Erasmus Darwin and Robert Chambers in England also
tried to make a theory of evolution believable; though their efforts
were but little more successful in gaining the ear of the world.

But to all that had gone before Charles Darwin and A.R. Wallace (1858)
added the idea of "natural selection," or "the struggle for existence,"
to use the respective terms coined by each of these authors, as the
chief means by which the effects of variation are accumulated and
perpetuated so as to build up the modern complexities of the plant and
animal kingdoms. Partly because it was a psychological moment, from the
fact that the uniformitarian geology of Lyell with its graded advance of
existences from age to age seemed absolutely to demand some evolutionary
explanation; partly because artificial selection was a familiar idea of
proved value in selective breeding, and "natural selection" seemed an
exact parallel carried on by nature in the direction of continual
improvement; but perhaps more largely because the abstract idea of
"natural selection" involved so many intricate separate concepts that
for nearly a generation scarcely two naturalists in the world could
state the whole problem of the theory exactly alike;--on all these
accounts the theory of natural selection, or of the "survival of the
fittest," to use the phrase of Herbert Spencer, became in the latter
decades of the nineteenth century well-nigh universal.

But about 1887 a faction or school arose who criticized the main idea of
Darwin and Wallace and fell back on the Lamarckian factor of the
transmission of acquired characters as really the essential cause of
the process of evolution. Herbert Spencer, E.D. Cope and others did much
to criticize natural selection as inadequate to do what was attributed
to it, dwelling on the importance of the transmission of acquired
characters. Spencer even went so far as to declare, "either there has
been inheritance of acquired characters, or there has been no
evolution." These Neo-Lamarckians argued that natural selection alone
can neither explain the origin of varieties, nor the first steps in the
slow advance toward