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edition of his System of Nature, he began to
wonder whether the transmutation of species by variation might not be
possible. Then came the great poet who jumped over the facts to the
conclusion. Goethe said that all the shapes of creation were cousins;
that there must be some common stock from which all the species had
sprung; that it was the environment of air that had produced the eagle,
of water the seal, and of earth the mole. He could not say how this
happened; but he divined that it did happen. Erasmus Darwin, the
grandfather of Charles, carried the environment theory much further,
pointing out instance after instance of modifications made in species
apparently to adapt it to circumstances and environment: for instance,
that the brilliant colors of the leopard, which make it so conspicuous in
Regent's Park, conceal it in a tropical jungle. Finally he wrote, as his
declaration of faith, 'The world has been evolved, not created: it has
arisen little by little from a small beginning, and has increased through

the activity of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather
grown than come into being at an almighty word. What a sublime idea
of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the
Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the
Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of
effects than to produce the effects themselves.' In this, published in the
year 1794, you have nineteenth-century Evolution precisely defined.
And Erasmus Darwin was by no means its only apostle. It was in the
air then. A German biologist named Treviranus, whose book was
published in 1802, wrote, 'In every living being there exists a capacity
for endless diversity of form. Each possesses the power of adapting its
organization to the variations of the external world; and it is this power,
called into activity by cosmic changes, which has enabled the simple
zoophytes of the primitive world to climb to higher and higher stages of
organization, and has brought endless variety into nature.' There you
have your evolution of Man from the amoeba all complete whilst
Nelson was still alive on the seas. And in 1809, before the battle of
Waterloo, a French soldier named Lamarck, who had beaten his musket
into a microscope and turned zoologist, declared that species were an
illusion produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they
were constantly changing and melting into one another and into new
forms as surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it
moves so slowly that it looks stationary to us. We have since come to
think that its industry is less continuous: that the clock stops for a long
time, and then is suddenly 'put on' by a mysterious finger. But never
mind that just at present.
THE ADVENT OF THE NEO-LAMARCKIANS
I call your special attention to Lamarck, because later on there were
Neo-Lamarckians as well as Neo-Darwinians. I was a Neo-Lamarckian.
Lamarck passed on from the conception of Evolution as a general law
to Charles Darwin's department of it, which was the method of
Evolution. Lamarck, whilst making many ingenious suggestions as to
the reaction of external causes on life and habit, such as changes of
climate, food supply, geological upheavals and so forth, really held as
his fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because

they wanted to. As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and
disuse. If you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see, you
will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have
eyes and dont want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating
the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your
energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long neck,
like the giraffe. This seems absurd to inconsiderate people at the first
blush; but it is within the personal experience of all of us that it is just
by this process that a child tumbling about the floor becomes a boy
walking erect; and that a man sprawling on the road with a bruised chin,
or supine on the ice with a bashed occiput, becomes a bicyclist and a
skater. The process is not continuous, as it would be if mere practice
had anything to do with it; for though you may improve at each
bicycling lesson during the lesson, when you begin your next lesson
you do not begin at the point at which you left off: you relapse
apparently to the beginning. Finally, you succeed quite suddenly, and
do not relapse again. More miraculous still, you at once