"As to Lamarck, I find that Grove, who has been reading him, is wonderfully struck with his book. I remember that it was the conclusion he (Lamarck) came to about man, that fortified me thirty years ago against the great impression which his argument at first made on my mind--all the greater because Constant Prevost, a pupil of Cuvier forty years ago, told me his conviction 'that Cuvier thought species not real, but that science could not advance without assuming that they were so.'" ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ "When I came to the conclusion that after all Lamarck was going to be shown to be right, that we must 'go the whole orang,' I re-read his book, and remembering when it was written, I felt I had done him injustice. "Even as to man's gradual acquisition of more and more ideas, and then of speech slowly as the ideas multiplied, and then his persecution of the beings most nearly allied and competing with him--all this is very Darwinian. "The substitution of the variety-making power for 'volition,' 'muscular action,' etc. (and in plants even volition was not called in), is in some respects only a change of names. Call a new variety a new creation, one may say of the former, as of the latter, what you say when you observe that the creationist explains nothing, and only affirms 'it is so because it is so.' "Lamarck's belief in the slow changes in the organic and inorganic world in the year 1800 was surely above the standard of his times, and he was right about progression in the main, though you have vastly advanced that doctrine. As to Owen in his 'Aye Aye' paper, he seems to me a disciple of Pouchet, who converted him at Rouen to 'spontaneous generation.' "Have I not, at p. 412, put the vast distinction between you and Lamarck as to 'necessary progression' strongly enough?" (To Darwin, March 15, 1863. _Lyell's Letters_, ii., p. 365.) Darwin, in the freedom of private correspondence, paid scant respect to the views of his renowned predecessor, as the following extracts from his published letters will show: "Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression,' 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals,' etc. But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so." (Darwin's _Life and Letters_, ii., p. 23, 1844.) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ "With respect to books on this subject, I do not know of any systematical ones, except Lamarck's, which is veritable rubbish.... Is it not strange that the author of such a book as the _Animaux sans Vertèbres_ should have written that insects, which never see their eggs, should _will_ (and plants, their seeds) to be of particular forms, so as to become attached to particular objects."[57] (ii., p. 29, 1844.) ~ ~ ~ ~ ~