Before the doctrine of evolution could live and take its proper place, it had to be reborn in England--the country of liberty. This resuscitation was due to Darwin, who added to it his illuminating doctrine of natural selection. But apart from this and a perfecting of its various details, Lamarck had already formulated the doctrine of evolution with perfect precision. Lamarck's work was still-born, whereas that of Darwin lived and grew to its full development. This was due, not to any imperfection or insufficiency in Lamarck's work, but {164} to the milieu into which it was born. It was the environment that stifled the offspring of Lamarck. In 1868, Ernest Haeckel speaks of the genius of Lamarck in these words: "The chief of the natural philosophers of France is Jean Lamarck, who takes his place beside Goethe and Darwin in the history of evolution. To him belongs the imperishable glory of being the first to formulate the theory of descent, and of founding the philosophy of nature on the solid basis of biology," and adds, "There is no country in Europe where Darwin's doctrine has had so little influence as in France." Haeckel has but done tardy justice in his discovery of and testimony to the genius of Lamarck. The spirit of opposition does not seem to have much changed in France since Lamarck's time. In 1907 the Academie des Sciences de Paris excluded from its _Comptes Rendus_ the report of my researches on diffusion and osmosis, because it raised the question of spontaneous generation. The majority of scientists seem to consider that the question of spontaneous generation was definitely settled once for all when Pasteur's experiments showed that a sterilized liquid, kept in a closed tube, remained sterile. Without the idea of spontaneous generation and a physical theory of life, the doctrine of evolution is a mutilated hypothesis without unity or cohesion. On this point Lamarck speaks most clearly: "Although it is customary when one speaks of the members of the animal or vegetable kingdom to call them products of nature, it appears that no definite conception is attached to the expression. Our preconceived notions hinder us from recognising the fact that Nature herself possesses all the faculties and all the means of producing living beings in any variety. She is able to vary, very slowly but without cessation, all the different races and all the different forms of life, and to maintain the general order which we see in all her works."