d
material was known to the Greeks, was developed by the Romans, and
even received the approval of early Christian Fathers, who wrote long
before the idea had been invented that the naive legends of the Old
Testament were an authoritative and literal account of the origin of
the world. After a long interval, in which scientific thought was
stifled by theological dogmatism, the theory of evolution,
particularly in its application to animals, began to reappear, long
before Darwin published _The Origin of Species_. Buffon, the great
French naturalist, and Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, had
expressed in the clearest way the possibility that species had not
been created independently, but had arisen from other species. Lamarck
had worked out a theory of descent in the fullest detail, and regarded
it as the foundation of the whole science of biology. He taught that
the beginning of life consisted only of the simplest and lowest plants
and animals; that the more complex animals and plants arose from
these, and that even man himself had come from ape-like mammals. He
held that the course of development of the earth and of all the
creatures upon it was a slow and continuous change, uninterrupted by
violent revolutions. He summed up the causes of organic evolution in
the following propositions[D]:

"1. Life tends by its inherent forces to increase the volume of
each living body and of all its parts up to a limit determined by
its own needs.

"2. New wants in animals give rise to new movements which
produce organs.

"3. The development of these organs is in proportion to their
employment.

"4. New developments are transmitted to offspring."

He supported especially the last two propositions by a series of
examples as to the effects of use and disuse; and the most famous of
these, the theory that giraffes had produced their long necks by
continually stretching up towards the trees on which they fed, is well
known to everyone. However, the ingenious speculations of Lamarck were
unsupported by a sufficient range of actual knowledge of anatomy, and
lacked experimental proof. He entirely failed to convince his
contemporaries; and Darwin himself, in a letter to Lyell, declared
that he had gained nothing from two readings of Lamarck's book. There
can be little doubt but that several Continental writers, in
particular Haeckel, have exaggerated Lamarck's services to the
devel