Various explanations of Darwin’s treatment of Lamarck have been offered. One at least, that of a disposition to run down a predecessor from jealousy, we may exclude as absolutely as is possible with poor human nature. Everything we know of Darwin in other connections justifies us in doing this. Professor Osborn, after referring to ‘the disdainful allusions to him [Lamarck] by Charles Darwin (the only writer of whom Darwin ever spoke in this tone)’[395] observes that ‘it is very evident from all Darwin’s criticisms of Lamarck, that he had never studied him carefully in the original.’[396] But against this view we have to set Darwin’s own comment (italics mine): ‘What I consider, after _two deliberate readings_, as a wretched book, and one from which (I well remember my surprise) I gained nothing.’[397] It is true that Darwin, as in the quotation above as to ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals,’ apparently misinterpreted Lamarck’s view of the self-adaptation of the individual to its environment into the absurd assumption that animals and even plants deliberately willed their own evolutionary progress; but on the other hand Darwin all his life and especially in his later period wavered toward Lamarck’s adaptation theories. It has been suggested that in Darwin’s university years French thought and French scientists were distinctly in disfavor and that Darwin imbibed an enduring dislike of them.[398] Darwin himself hints that he may have been influenced by a prejudice in favor of his grandfather as Lamarck’s predecessor. But it seems more probable that he disliked Lamarck because he regarded him as a theorist and speculator who did not found his argument on a sufficiently broad basis of fact, whereas Darwin toiled for years at observation and experiment before he gave his theory to the world at all. This explanation is indicated in Darwin’s remark to Lyell: ‘As for Lamarck, as you have such a man as Grove with you, you are triumphant; not that I can alter my opinion that to me it was an absolutely useless book. Perhaps this was owing to my always searching books for facts.’[399] In any case one cannot help wishing that Darwin had spoken of a man so prominent and so highly esteemed as Lamarck a little differently. II