AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EVOLUTIONIST.
Lamarck, the Pounder of Evolution : his Life and Work. By Alpheus S. Packard. (Longmans and Co. 9s. net.)—Professor Packard is an eminent American member of what is known as the " Neo-Lamarckian School" of evolutionists, who hold (in opposi- tion to Darwin and Weismann) that characters acquired by the effects of environment are inherited by offspring, and thus tend directly to modify the forms of a species. Of course this is not to be taken as an attempt to diminish the just fame of Darwin, whose triumphant exposition of the work done by natural selection in modifying species has been the chief factor in the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution by thinking people general. But the Neo-Lamarckians feel that natural selection
alone is not sufficient—as some of the Darwinians hold it—to account for the extraordinarily numerous and different species into which the first germs of life have developed. "Darwin's phrase,
• natural selection," writes Mr. Packard, "or Herbert Spencer's term, 'survival of the fittest,' expresses simply the final result; while the process of the origination of the new forms which have survived, or been selected by Nature, is to be explained by the action of the physical environments of the animals coupled with inheritance-force. It has always appeared to the writer that the phrases quoted above have been misused to state the cause, when they simply express the result of the action of a chain of causes which we may, with Herbert Spencer, call the environ- ment' of the organism undergoing modification ; and thus a form of Lamarckianism, greatly modified by recent scientific discoveries, seems to meet most of the difficulties which arise in accounting for the origination of species and higher groups of organisms." It helps us, in fact, to answer the almost insoluble question—what first started the "tendency to vary" which Darwin assumed in all living forms as the starting point of his great and far-reaching theory P—and in that respect it is at least iateresting to know how Neo-Lamarckianism has come into its present shape. That question is very completely answered in Professor Packard's interesting book, which not only gives a full narrative of Lamarck-'s long and busy life, but expounds his evolutionary theory by means of full quotations from his writings, which are by no means readily accessible to the ordinary student. Lamarck was not exactly the "founder of evolution "—a rather unhappy phrase—nor even the first upholder of the evolutionary doctrine. But as Darwin said, he was "the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention." Professor Packard's very able and interesting book deserves the attention of all who, with- out necessarily being trained biologists, take an intelligent interest in the great problems of life and development.
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