He recognised the perfect gradation of forms by which in many
cases one species after another merges into the next on either side of
it. He observed the analogy between the modifications induced by man and
the modifications induced by nature. In fact, he was a thorough-going
and convinced evolutionist, holding every salient opinion which Society
still believes to have been due to the works of Charles Darwin. In one
point only, a minor point to outsiders, though a point of cardinal
importance to the inner brotherhood of evolutionism, he did not
anticipate his more famous successor. He thought organic evolution was
wholly due to the direct action of surrounding circumstances, to the
intercrossing of existing forms, and above all to the actual efforts of
animals themselves. In other words, he had not discovered natural
selection, the cardinal idea of Charles Darwin's epoch-making book. For
him, the giraffe had acquired its long neck by constant reaching up to
the boughs of trees; the monkey had acquired its opposable thumb by
constant grasping at the neighbouring branches; and the serpent had
acquired its sinuous shape by constant wriggling through the grass of
the meadows. Charles Darwin improved upon all that by his suggestive
hint of survival of the fittest, and in so far, but in so far alone, he
became the real father of modern biological evolutionism.
From the days of Lamarck, to the day when Charles Darwin himself
published his wonderful 'Origin of Species,' this idea that plants and
animals might really have grown, instead of having been made all of a
piece, kept brewing everywhere in the minds and brains of scientific
thinkers.
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