Erasmus Darwin ("Zoonomia," 1794), though a zealous evolutionist, can hardly be said to have made any real advance on his predecessors; and, notwithstanding that Goethe (1791-4) had the advantage of a wide knowledge of morphological facts, and a true insight into their signification, while he threw all the power of a great poet into the expression of his conceptions, it may be questioned whether he supplied the doctrine of evolution with a firmer scientific basis than it already possessed. Moreover, whatever the value of Goethe's labours in that field, they were not published before 1820, long after evolutionism had taken a new departure from the works of Treviranus and Lamarck--the first of its advocates who were equipped for their task with the needful large and accurate knowledge of the phenomena of life, as a whole. It is remarkable that each of these writers seems to have been led, independently and contemporaneously, to invent the same name of "Biology" for the science of the phenomena of life; and thus, following Buffon, to have recognised the essential unity of these phenomena, and their contradistinction from those of inanimate nature. And it is hard to say whether Lamarck or Treviranus has the priority in propounding the main thesis of the doctrine of evolution; for though the first volume of Treviranus's "Biologie" appeared only in 1802, he says, in the preface to his later work, the "Erscheinungen und Gesetze des organischen Lebens," dated 1831, that he wrote the first volume of the "Biologie" "nearly five-and-thirty years ago," or about 1796. Now, in 1794, there is evidence that Lamarck held doctrines which present a striking contrast to those which are to be found in the "Philosophie Zoologique," as the following passages show:-- "685. Quoique mon unique objet dans cet article n'ait été que de traiter de la cause physique de l'entretien de la vie des êtres organiques, malgré cela j'ai osé avancer en débutant, que l'existence de ces êtres étonnants n'appartiennent nullement à la nature; que tout ce qu'on peut entendre par le mot _nature_, ne pouvoit donner la vie, c'est-à-dire, que toutes les qualités de la matière, jointes à toutes les circonstances possibles, et même à l'activité répandue dans l'univers, ne pouvaient point produire un être muni du mouvement organique, capable de reproduire son semblable, et sujet à la mort.