Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/837

Rh, or the desire strongly centered in some particular object. The conception is perfectly legitimate, for instance, that when a species is subjected to any external modifying cause, affecting all its members alike, the adaptive modifications which natural selection, under such circumstances, would play upon, have their origin in the emotions, or the influences at work on the pregnant females, giving direction in their offspring, to the needed changes. In this way it is probable that only those individuals born under such conditions would be able to survive. Thus this becomes no mere ancillary cause of variation, but one of deepest import and at the very foundation of evolution. The female in this light acquires an increased importance, and evolution finds her not only the essential at the dawn of life upon our planet, but, in its present highest manifestations, she is nearest by instinct, intuition, and aspiration to the Controlling Mind which in the beginning quickened the great womb of Nature and down through all the ages guided the continuous stream of life to designed ends through the womb of the individual mother.

As already remarked, the psychical factors which we have been considering are substantially Lamarckian, and in proportion as we consider them and get to understand the other direct causes of variation, must we give importance to the ideas of Lamarck and, conversely, less importance to the ideas of Darwin.

Did time permit, I should like to go into an analysis of Lamarck's "Philosophie zoologique," and show how the genius of this illustrious French naturalist anticipated a very large part of that which Darwin subsequently so laboriously helped to establish. I must pass the subject, however, and simply record my surprise that one who was otherwise so honest and fair toward other writers, was so evidently unfair in his estimate of the work of Lamarck, as Darwin, in the "Life and Letters," is shown to have been. It is incomprehensible, reading Lamarck with our present knowledge, that Darwin should have found neither fact nor ideas in a book which abounds in both, except on the theory of a poor translation or that strange national antipathy which has so often prevented the people of one country from doing justice to those of the other and which so long prejudiced the French Academy against Darwin's own especial theories.

Darwinism assumes essential ignorance of the causes of variation, and is based on the inherent tendency thereto in the offspring. Lamarckism, on the contrary, recognizes in use and disuse, desire and the physical environment, immediate causes of variation affecting the individual and transmitted to the offspring, in which it may be intensified again both by inheritance and further individual modification. Both represent important principles in evolution and co-operate to bring about the results. The