CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: PROFESSOR RAY LANKESTER AND

B

LAMARCK

EING ANXIOUS TO GIVE THE READER A sample of the arguments against the theory of natural selection from among variations that are mainly either directly or indirectly functional in their inception, or more briefly against the Erasmus-Darwinian and Lamarckian systems, I can find nothing more to the point, or more recent, than Professor Ray Lankester's letter to the Athenaeum of 29th March 1884, to the latter part of which, however, I need alone call attention. Professor Ray Lankester says:

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And then we are introduced to the discredited speculations of Lamarck, which have found a worthy advocate in Mr. Butler, as really solid contributions to the discovery of the verae causae of variation! A much more important attempt to do something for Lamarck's hypothesis, of the transmission to offspring of structural peculiarities acquired by the parents, was recently made by an able and experienced naturalist, Professor Semper of Würzburg. His book on Animal Life, etc., is published in the International Scientific Series. Professor Semper adduces an immense number and variety of cases of structural change in animals and plants brought about in the individual by adaptation (during its individual life-history) to new conditions. Some of these are very marked changes, such as the loss of its horny coat in the gizzard of a pigeon fed on meat; but in no single instance could Professor Semper show-although it was his object and desire to do so if possible-that such change was transmitted from parent to offspring. Lamarckism looks all very well on paper, but, as Professor Semper's book shows, when put to the test of observation and experiment it collapses absolutely."

I should have thought it would have been enough if it had collapsed without the "absolutely," but Professor Ray Lankester does not like doing things by halves. Few will be taken in by the foregoing quotation, except those who do not greatly care whether they are taken in or not; but to save trouble to readers who may have neither Lamarck nor Professor Semper at hand, I will put the case as follows:

Professor Semper writes a book to show, we will say, that the hour-hand of the clock moves gradually forward, in spite of its appearing Stationary. He makes his case sufficiently clear, and then might have been content to leave it; nevertheless, in the innocence of his heart, he adds the admission that though he had often looked at the clock for a long time together, he had never been able actually to see the hourhand moving. "There now," exclaims Professor Ray Lankester on this, "I told you so; the theory collapses absolutely; his whole object and desire is to show that the hour-hand moves, and yet when it comes to the point, he is obliged to confess that he cannot see it do so." It is not worth while to meet what Professor Ray Lankester has been above quoted as saying about Lamarckism beyond quoting the following passage from a review of The Neanderthal Skull on Evolution in the Journal of Science for June 1885 (p. 362):

"On the very next page the author reproduces the threadbare objection that the supporters of the theory have never yet succeeded in observing a single instance in all the millions of years invented (!) in its support of one species of animal life turning into another.' Now, ex hypothesi, one species turns into another not rapidly, as in a transformation scene, but in successive generations, each being born a shade different from its progenitors. Hence to observe such a change is excluded by the very terms of the question. Does Mr. Savile forget Mr. Herbert Spencer's apologue of the ephemeron which had never witnessed the change of a child into a man?"

The apologue, I may say in passing, is not Mr. Spencer's; it is by the author of the Vestiges, and will be found on page 161 of the 1853 edition of that book; but let this pass. How impatient Professor Ray Lankester is of any attempt to call attention to the older view of evolution appears perhaps even more plainly in a review of this same book of Professor Semper's that appeared in Nature, 3rd March 1881. The tenor of the remarks last quoted shows that though what I

am about to quote is now more than five years old, it may be taken as still giving us the position which Professor Ray Lankester takes on these matters. He wrote:

"It is necessary," he exclaims, "to plainly and emphatically state" (Why so much emphasis? Why not " it should be stated "?)" that Professor Semper and a few other writers of similar views " (I have sent for the number of Modern Thought referred to by Professor Ray Lankester but find no article by Mr. Henslow, and do not, therefore, know what he had said)" are not adding to or building on Mr. Darwin's theory, but are actually opposing all that is essential and distinctive in that theory, by the revival of the exploded notion of directly transforming agents' advocated by Lamarck and others.'

It may be presumed that these writers know they are not "adding to or building on " Mr. Darwin's theory, and do not wish to build on it, as not thinking it a sound foundation. Professor Ray Lankester says they are "actually opposing," as though there were something intolerably audacious in this; but it is not easy to see why he should be more angry with them for "actually opposing " Mr. Darwin than they may be with him, if they think it worth while, for "actually defending" the exploded notion of natural selection-for assuredly the Charles-Darwinian system is now more exploded than Lamarck's is.

What Professor Ray Lankester says about Lamarck and directly transforming agents " will mislead those who take his statement without examination. Lamarck does not say that modification is effected by means of " directly transforming agents "; nothing can be more alien to the spirit of his teaching. With him the action of the external conditions of existence (and these are the only transforming agents intended by Professor Ray Lankester) is not direct, but indirect. Change in surroundings changes the organism's outlook, and thus changes its desires; desires changing, E.g., the Rev. George Henslow, in Modern Thought, vol. ii, no. 5,

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1881.

there is corresponding change in the actions performed; actions changing, a corresponding change is by-and-by induced in the organs that perform them; this, if long continued, will be transmitted; becoming augmented by accumulation in many successive generations, and further modifications perhaps arising through further changes in surroundings, the change will amount ultimately to specific and generic difference. Lamarck knows no drug, nor operation, that will medicine one organism into another, and expects the results of adaptive effort to be so gradual as to be only perceptible when accumulated in the course of many generations. When, therefore, Professor Ray Lankester speaks of Lamarck as having "advocated directly transforming agents," he either does not know what he is talking about, or he is trifling with his readers. Professor Ray Lankester

continues:

We

"They do not seem to be aware of this, for they make no attempt to examine Mr. Darwin's accumulated facts and arguments." Professor Ray Lankester need not shake Mr. Darwin's "accumulated facts and arguments" at us. have taken more pains to understand them than Professor Ray Lankester has taken to understand Lamarck, and by this time know them sufficiently. We thankfully accept by far the greater number, and rely on them as our sheet-anchors to save us from drifting on to the quicksands of neo-Darwinian natural selection; few of them, indeed, are Mr. Darwin's, except in so far as he has endorsed them and given them publicity, but I do not know that this detracts from their value. We have paid great attention to Mr. Darwin's facts, and if we do not understand all his arguments-for it is not always given to mortal man to understand these-yet we think we know what he was driving at. We believe we understand this to the full as well as Mr. Darwin intended us to do, and perhaps better. Where the arguments tend to show that all animals and plants are descended from a common source we find them much the same as Buffon's, or as those of Erasmus Darwin or Lamarck, and have nothing

to say against them; where, on the other hand, they aim at proving that the main means of modification has been the fact that if an animal has been "favoured" it will be " preserved"-then we think that the animal's own exertions will, in the long run, have had more to do with its preservation than any real or fancied " favour." Professor Ray Lankester continues:

"The doctrine of evolution has become an accepted truth" (Professor Ray Lankester writes as though the making of truth and falsehood lay in the hollow of Mr. Darwin's hand. Surely "has become accepted" should be enough; Mr. Darwin did not make the doctrine true) "entirely in consequence of Mr. Darwin's having demonstrated the mechanism" (There is no mechanism in the matter, and if there is, Mr. Darwin did not show it. He made some words which confused us and prevented us from seeing that "the preservation of favoured races was a cloak for "luck," and that this was all the explanation he was giving) "by which the evolution is possible; it was almost universally rejected, while such undemonstrable agencies as those arbitrarily asserted to exist by Professor Semper and Mr. George Henslow were the only means suggested by its advocates."

Undoubtedly the theory of descent with modification, which received its first sufficiently ample and undisguised exposition in 1809 with the Philosophie Zoologique of Lamarck, shared the common fate of all theories that revolutionize opinion on important matters, and was fiercely opposed by the Huxleys, Romaneses, Grant Allens, and Ray Lankesters of its time. It had to face the reaction in favour of the Church which began in the days of the First Empire, as a natural consequence of the horrors of the Revolution; it had to face the social influence and then almost Darwinian reputation of Cuvier, whom Lamarck could not, or would not, square; it was put forward by one who was old, poor, and ere long blind. What theory could do more than just keep itself alive under conditions so unfavourable? Even under