earth and ocean were probably peopled with vegetable productions long before the existence of animals, and many families of these animals long before other animals of them, shall we conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament is and has been the cause of all organic life?" Nor does he make any exception to this law of organic development. He quotes Buffon and Helvetius to the effect--"that many features in the anatomy of man point to a former quadrupedal position, and indicate that he is not yet fully adapted to the erect position; that, further, man may have arisen from a single family of monkeys, in which, accidentally, the opposing muscle brought the thumb against the tips of the fingers, and that this muscle gradually increased in size by use in successive generations." While we who live in these days of fuller knowledge of agents of variation may detect the _minus_ in all foregoing speculations, our interest is increased in the thought of their near approach to the cardinal discovery. And a rapid run through the later writings of Dr. Darwin shows that there is scarcely a side of the great theory of Evolution which has escaped his notice or suggestive comment. Grant Allen, in his excellent little monograph on Charles Darwin, says that the theory of "natural selection was the only cardinal one in the evolutionary system on which Erasmus Darwin did not actually forestall his more famous and greater namesake. For its full perception, the discovery of Malthus had to be collated with the speculations of Buffon." In the Historical Sketch on the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species, which Darwin prefixed to his book, he refers to Lamarck as "the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention;" rendering "the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition." Lamarck was born at Bezantin, in Picardy, in 1744. Intended for the Church, he chose the army, but an injury resulting from a practical joke cut short his career as a soldier. He then became a banker's clerk, in which occupation he secured leisure for his favourite pursuit of natural history. Through Buffon's influence he procured a civil appointment, and ultimately became a colleague of Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire in the Museum of Natural History at Paris. Of Cuvier it will here suffice to say that he remained to the end of his life a believer in special creation, or, what amounts to the same thing, a series of special creations which, he held, followed the catastrophic annihilations of prior plants and animals. Although orthodox by conviction, his researches told against his tenets, because his important work in the reconstruction of skeletons of long extinct animals laid the foundation of palæontology.