The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology [2nd printing 1995. Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674731363, 9780674731455

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THE

Lamarck in 1802. From Archives du Muséum d'Histoire sixth series, 6 (1930).

Naturelle,

THE

SPIRIT OF SYSTEM LAMARCK AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY NOW W I T H "LAMARCK IN 1995'

Richard W Burkhardt, Jr.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Copyright © 1977, 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Second printing, 1995 First Harvard University Press paperback edition, 1995 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burkhardt, Richard W. (Richard Wellington), 1944The spirit of system: Lamarck and evolutionary biology: now with "Lamarck in 1995" / Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-674-83317-1 (cloth). — ISBN 0-674-83318-X (paper) 1. Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de, 1744-1829. 2. Evolution (Biology)—History. 3. Biologists—France—Biography. I. Title. QH31.L2B87 1995 95-10861 575.01'66'092—dc20 CIP [B]

For my father and

mother

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his biology in the form of his ideas on the action of subtle fluids, most notably "the matter o f fire." This b o o k gives a general overview o f late-eighteenth-century ideas about subtle fluids and their importance for organic functions, but there is more that can be said and now has been said about Lamarck's thoughts on these fluids—how they functioned in his physico-chemical system, and how c o n c e r n e d he was with their action at the time his transformist views were taking shape. O f particular use here are the work of L. J . Burlingame (1981, and references in the original bibliography), who was the first to undertake a thorough study of Lamarck's chemistry after Gillispie's pioneering contributions, and Yvette Conry's subtle and profound essay (1981) on the possibility of reading Lamarck as a Newtonian. Roger (1979) also explores the links between Lamarck's chemistry and his conceptualization of a new science of "biology." For the study of Lamarck's chemistry in its own right, one should begin with Burlingame's writings and c o n s u l t also Abbri ( 1 9 9 3 ) and G o u x ( f o r t h c o m i n g ) . Burlingame identifies Lamarck with a natural history tradition in chemistry, contrasting this tradition with Lavoisier's physico-mathematical approach, and she observes that Lamarck was not alone among French scientists in the 1780s and 1790s when it came to r e s i s t i n g t h e new c h e m i s t r y o f L a v o i s i e r ; s h e n a m e s J . - C . Delamétherie, A. Baumé, Β. G. Sage, J . F. Demachy, C. Opoix, and Α. G. Monnet along with Lamarck in this respect. Jacques Roger (1979) compares Lamarck's physico-chemistry with Buffon's. Ferdinando Abbri (1993) stresses that Lamarck's "logique physico-chimique" was in opposition not only to the new chemistry of Lavoisier but to the whole analytical approach of phlogistonists and antiphlogistonists alike, a point also made by Gillispie. J.-M. Goux (forthcoming) calls special attention to the energetics of Lamarck's chemistry. Burlingame's doctoral dissertation still offers the most extensive discussion o f Lamarck's meteorology, though a useful sketch of this aspect o f his work can be found in Jordanova ( 1 9 8 4 ) , and Corsi ( 1 9 8 3 / 1 9 8 8 ) comments on how Lamarck's failure to acknowledge the work of contemporary writers on meteorology led to hard feelings among them. For Lamarck's geology, Corsi (1983/1988) is particularly helpful both in its discussion of late-eighteenth-century debates on the theory of the earth and in its analysis of Lamarck's own unwillingness to construct a theory that dealt with the earth's origin. Corsi properly stresses the incongruities between Lamarck's view of the history of life and "a geological dynamics and a miner-

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alogical theory that glossed over the problem of beginnings and required the indefinite presence of all the organic and inorganic components of the earth's crust."4 With regard to Lamarck's paleontology, Martin Rudwick's The Meaning ofFossils (1972) deserves mention here for its third chapter. The most comprehensive study of French paleontology is now Goulven Laurent's study (1987) of the field from 1800 to 1860. Laurent has scrutinized not only the broad theoretical writings but also the narrow, technical studies of the scientists he treats. His analysis of Lamarck's paleontological researches pursues Lamarck through the details of his "Mémoires sur les fossiles des environs de Paris" and the later volumes of his Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres, two sources inadequately explored by the Lamarck scholars who have tended to focus on his more theoretical writings. Laurent also discusses the great many other individuals who contributed to French paleontology, and he shows the diversity of opinion among them regarding the questions of the earth's history and the mutability of species. Important work has also been done on Lamarck's thoroughgoing "naturalism" and the relation of his philosophical thought to more general philosophical trends of his day. This topic, suggested earlier in F. Picavet's Les Idéologues (1891, see the original bibliography), has been developed by Ludmilla Jordan ova in her University of Cambridge doctoral thesis (1976) and, in summary form, in her Lamarck (1984), as well as by Giulio Barsanti in his Dalla stona naturale alla storia della natura: Saggio su Lamarck (1979). Important too is Robert J. Richards's discussion of the tradition of the psychology of sensation and early evolutionary biology (1979, 1987). Although Lamarck was happy to distinguish himself from such idéologues as P.J.G. Cabanis by insisting that, as a naturalist, he had the advantage of considering not only humans but the whole sweep of the animal scale, Lamarck nonetheless shared many of the idéologues' concerns. His explanation of the emergence of the higher mental faculties in conjunction with the evolution of higher levels of organization can be seen as his naturaliste-philosophe's development of a discourse set forth by these philosophes before him. For additional attention to Lamarck's thoughts on the faculties associated with particular levels of organization, see especially Jordan ova on Lamarck's concept of the sentiment intérieur (1981) and my papers on Lamarck's ideas on animal behavior (Burkhardt 1981 and "Animal Behavior and Organic Mutability," forthcoming). For

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Lamarck's thoughts on the distinctiveness of "biology" as a science, see Barsanti (1994). Among other concerns, Condillac and his idéologue followers paid close attention to the importance of language for the development of the sciences. Jordanova has pursued the subject of Lamarck's use of language in h e r 1989 p a p e r "Nature's Powers: A Reading of Lamarck's Distinction between Creation and Production." In that paper she argues that Lamarck's careful use of this distinction represented his attempt to develop a language free from theological associations. For Lamarck's judgments on humanity, expressed primarily in dictionary articles of the 1810s and in his Système analytique des connaissances positives de l'homme of 1820, Jordanova's 1984 Lamarck is an excellent source, as is Jacques Roger's 1985 article on Lamarck and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For specific attention to knowledge of primates in Lamarck's day, and Lamarck's thoughts on human evolution f r o m a primate ancestor, see Barsanti (forthcoming) and Laurent(1989). LAMARCK'S INTELLECTUAL MILIEU One of the stated aims of this book was "reconstructing the intellectual milieu in which Lamarck operated as a means of evaluating the guiding features of Lamarck's evolutionary thought" (p. 11). This was not a straightforward task, given the nature of the historical record Lamarck left behind. He was not inclined to identify his intellectual debts or outline the complexities of the intellectual landscape of his day. In his published writings he exaggerated both his novelty as a thinker and his isolation from the rest of the scientific community, and the few manuscripts he left behind tell little about his interactions with other scientists. There is a published list of the books from his library that were auctioned off after his death, though owning a book and being influenced by its contents are two different matters. In comparing Lamarck's views with others of his time, I necessarily paid considerable attention to Georges Cuvier, with whom Lamarck has often been compared because of their opposing views on organic mutability and related issues, but who was also of crucial importance for Lamarck when it came to reforming the classification of the invertebrates (as Henri Daudin showed long ago). I also emphasized the significance of L.-J.-M. Daubenton, who was as important as anyone in defining the aims of French natural history late in the eighteenth century. In addition to Cuvier and Daubenton and two other colleagues

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of Lamarck's at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Faujas de SaintFond and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, I indicated the importance to L a m a r c k of his f r i e n d s a n d fellow naturalists J e a n - G u i l l a u m e Bruguière (a conchologist) and Guillaume-Antoine Olivier (an entomologist), and I n o t e d Lamarck's activity in the Société d'Histoire Naturelle de Paris, through which he was in contact with such lesserknown figures as Louis Bosc, Jean-Louis Reynier, and Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne. T h o u g h a few of the less well known names (and various others that a p p e a r in the text, including Jean-Claude Delamétherie, Pierre Denys de Montfort, Denis-Bernard Quatremère Disjonval, François Péron, Baron Tschoudi, and more) represented a widening of the cast of characters typically called u p o n to shed light on Lamarck's thinking, this book did not presume to offer a complete picture of the French natural history community in Lamarck's day, with "the names and n u m b e r s of all the players." Although there is still n o single work that accomplishes this, there are now several volumes that extend the n u m b e r of significant actors well beyond what is offered in this book as indeed does H e n r i Daudin's classic Cuvier et Lamarck: les classes zoologiques et l'idée de série animale (1790-1830). In addition to D a u d i n , o n e should consult the following excellent studies: Toby Appel's The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin, Pietro Corsi's The Age of Lamarck: Evolutionary Theories in, France, 1790-1830, a n d Dorinda O u t r a m ' s Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. O u t r a m ' s book is a path-breaking analysis of scientific and political power in the p e r i o d , focusing on Cuvier's shrewd negotiation of p a t r o n a g e relations over the course of his career (see also O u t r a m , f o r t h c o m i n g ) . T h e book provides a remarkably rich picture of various personal alliances that existed within a n d beyond the natural history community, and it shows, a m o n g o t h e r things, that Cuvier's power, considerable as it was, was seriously contested t h r o u g h o u t his career. This last point is also presented in Appel's and Corsi's books. Corsi's Age of Lamarck is especially interesting because of its attention to a wealth of naturalists outside the Muséum d'Histoire N a t u r e l l e a n d the Institut d e France who c o n t i n u e d to p r o m o t e B u f f o n i a n m o d e l s of n a t u r a l history in o p p o s i t i o n to t h e m o r e severe, empirical, a n d technical a p p r o a c h of comparative anatomy c h a m p i o n e d by Cuvier. T h e book has the great virtue of considerably e x p a n d i n g the n u m b e r of scientists whose writings illuminate the conceptual, methodological, and political dimensions of natural

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history as practiced in Paris in Lamarck's day. All four of the books listed in the previous paragraph should be considered required reading for anyone interested in the science of the day. Introducing more actors in the story of French natural history at the turn of the century enhances greatly our understanding of the scientific stakes in this period, even when some doubts remain about which actors and which issues were particularly important for Lamarck himself. For an evaluation of the earlier Linnaeus-Buffon debate as a contest over competing models of what natural history should be, see Barsanti (1984). THE RECEPTION OF LAMARCK'S EVOLUTIONARY VIEWS Few of Lamarck's countrymen published extended critiques of his ideas on organic mutability, and fewer if any embraced the comprehensive vision of biological transformism he set forth. This is not to say that there were not naturalists of the time who endorsed at least limited views of organic mutability. As this book suggests, among Lamarck's fellow professors at the Museum of Natural History at the turn of the century Lacépède and Faujas de Saint-Fond both had ideas on organic mutability, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, after possibly flirting with the idea of organic mutability in the 1790s, elaborated his own views on the subject some twenty years later. The naturalists Denys de Montfort and Delamétherie also promoted ideas of the production of living things, though their models of how living forms were produced were a long way from Lamarck's. The recent studies by Corsi (1983/1988) and Laurent (1987) have added significandy to the number of figures in the early nineteenth century who had at least some sympathy for the idea of change at the species level. Both authors have identified the interest of, among others, Julien-Joseph Virey, who was a transformist of sorts while also a critic of Lamarck as early as 1802 (Corsi 1987 and 1983/1988; Laurent 1987 and 1988), and J.-B. Bory de Saint-Vincent, who in the 1820s endorsed a Lamarckian sweep of successive production from the simple to the complex, albeit joined with Geoffroy's idea that all animals were formed from a single plan (a view that Lamarck himself had rejected). Claude Dupuis has written perceptively about Lamarck's close coworker Pierre Latreille (Dupuis 1974). In this book, though I identify reviewers of Lamarck's work such as Bosc, Tourlet, and Gall and Spurzheim, I spend a good deal of time dealing with Cuvier's treatment of Lamarck's ideas. The works of Appel, Corsi, Laurent, and Outram indicate that the public silence Cuvier

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h o p e d to see reign over Lamarck's speculations (notwithstanding Cuvier's own ridiculing of Lamarck in the course he gave at the Athenée de Paris in 1805) was not as complete as he desired, or as this text might seem to suggest. Continued examination of the work of naturalists in the nineteenth century indicates that many of them borrowed selectively from the work of both Lamarck and Cuvier (and others) without necessarily aligning themselves wholly with one or the other figure. This p h e n o m e n o n is nicely exhibited, for example, in Corsi's account of the Italian naturalist Franco Andrea Bonelli (Corsi 1983, 1984), and also in Phillip Sloan's forthcoming paper on the lectures of William Henry Green at the Royal College of Physicians in London. Sloan shows how Green, without endorsing transformism, created a novel synthesis of the views of Lamarck and Blumenbach. The reception of Lamarck's views in Britain has engendered a good deal of research, from Corsi's article on the importance of French transformist ideas for Lyell (1978) to Adrian Desmond's work on Lamarckism and radical British politics (1989), James Secord's work on the Edinburgh Lamarckians Robert Jameson and Robert Grant (1991), and Sloan's paper on Green. COMMON PROBLEMS IN THE REPRESENTATION OF LAMARCK'S THOUGHT This book and other recent books on Lamarck have attempted to give a broader picture of his transformist theorizing than that traditionally captured in the textbook association of Lamarck with the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Whereas the inadequacy of this association for understanding Lamarck's system is something on which all Lamarck scholars agree, there is another characterization of his thinking that has gained some popularity in the scholarly literature on evolution that needs to be questioned. According to Charles Gillispie, Lamarck transformed the scale of nature into an "escalator of being." Alternatively, as Peter Bowler puts it in his book Evolution: The History of an Idea, Lamarck's explanation of evolution involves "separate lines progressing in parallel along the same hierarchy." 5 The problem with these models of Lamarck's theory is that Lamarck never clearly endorsed the notion they invoke. He maintained that the present-day scale of increasing complexity exhibited by the animal classes represents the basic path nature followed in bringing all the different forms of life successively into existence. He also maintained that life is continually being spontaneously generated at the very bottom of the ani-

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mal scale (he revised this in 1815 to allow that the production of the invertebrates involved two separate, branching "series," with spontaneous generation taking place at the base of each of these; see pp. 159-164). But Lamarck never went so far as to say that each of the higher classes is constantly being produced from the class immediately below it (or that spontaneous generation takes place to fill the gap or gaps at the bottom of the scale left by the animals that have become more complex). It is true that Lamarck's theory, unlike Darwin's, should not be seen as a theory of common descent. Darwin's emphasis was on common ancestry, as evidenced in his concluding words of the Origin ofSpedes regarding "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful" having evolved from "a few" original forms "or one." Lamarck's emphasis, in contrast, was on "the presumed order of formation of the animals" (see p. 163). He never made the claim that Bowler makes for him, namely, that "each point on the scale of being we observe today has been derived by progression from a separate act of spontaneous generation." To represent Lamarck's theory as an escalator of being, or as a series of parallel evolutions beginning at different times, forces Lamarck to a position he never embraced on a question he never addressed. FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR LAMARCK STUDIES As already indicated, when this book was first written, historians of science tended to focus primarily on matters o f scientific theory. Scientific method also received attention, as, for example, in analyses of the importance of experimentation or quantification for the development of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but considerably less attention was given to the material details of scientific practice and their relation to the production of scientific knowledge and to contests to speak authoritatively in scientific matters. Inspired in part by the work of sociologists and anthropologists of science, a growing number of historians of science have come to look more closely at scientific practice in both its narrow and its broader dimensions. 6 T h e value of this approach for the study of French natural history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was evidenced in several of the papers presented in 1993 at the conference commemorating the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris,7 as well as in a number of the papers given at the Lamarck conference in Amiens in 1994. 8 It should not be inferred, however, that this interest in the practice of natural history is entirely

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new. Henri Daudin's path-breaking studies of French natural history in the e i g h t e e n t h and early n i n e t e e n t h centuries offer a wealth of insights on the interrelations of practice, theory, and scientific power.9 Nor should it be inferred that scientists themselves have nothing to contribute to historical studies of this sort. Scientists have often been attentive to features of practice that a historian without experience in the museum, the laboratory, or the field might not fully appreciate. A prime example of a m o d e r n scientist's adding significantly to the understanding of Lamarck as a practicing scientist was provided at the Amiens conference by Claude Dupuis on the subject of Lamarck as taxonomist (Dupuis, forthcoming). Further work also needs to be done on the different actors who sought to make their way in French natural history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the conceptual, institutional, material, and instrumental resources they employed in doing so. O u t r a m ' s work on Cuvier and systems of scientific and political patronage sets a model for further study. Her work and Corsi's identification of Buffonian and anti-Buffonian camps in French natural history should be followed up with still more attention to identifying the multiple, shifting alliances that structured the French scientific community and to determining how individual actors negotiated this complicated terrain. Pursuing the question of the reputation of Lamarck's ideas in the early nineteenth century, Corsi (forthcoming) is carrying forward a major project begun by Vachon (1981), identifying as many of the students who attended Lamarck's courses as possible. In my own recent work, I have focused on competing or complementary forms of scientific practice, contrasting Lamarck's cabinet naturalist's practice with that of the naturalist voyager François Péron a n d F r é d é r i c Cuvier, who o b s e r v e d wild a n i m a l s in captivity. (Burkhardt, " T h e Ménagerie and the Life of the Muséum" and "Unpacking Baudin: Models of Scientific Practice in the Age of Lamarck," both forthcoming. For further comments on practice, see also Burkhardt 1994). LAMARCK'S BIRDS, AND THE IDEA THAT HABITS PRECEDE STRUCTURES Both the importance of expanding the cast of characters for understanding Lamarck's t h o u g h t and the problem of reconstructing Lamarck's effective intellectual milieu are well illustrated by the issue of "Lamarck's birds." 10 It is well known that in the earliest exposition

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of his ideas on organic mutability Lamarck highlighted the idea that habits give rise to structures, that function precedes form. In the opening lecture of his course at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1800 he set this forth in the following terms: "I could prove that it is not at all the form either of the body or of its parts that gives rise to habits, to the way of life of animals, but that on the contrary it is the habits, the way of life, and all the influential circumstances that have with time built up the form of the body and the parts of animals. With new forms, new faculties have been acquired, and little by little nature has arrived at the state where we see her at present." 11 Although Lamarck's ideas on habits and organic change are most commonly associated today with the example of the giraffe, this was not the first example he used to suggest how forms change. Rather, he used birds, calling specific attention to the conformation of their feet. He cited the webbed feet of swimming birds, the hooked claws of perching birds, and the elongated legs of wading birds as indications of how habits shape forms (for his presentation of these examples, see pp. 171-172). Just why Lamarck chose these particular examples is open to interpretation. In this book I suggested that such examples were commonly advanced in the eighteenth century as illustrations of how well suited the structures of animals were to their habits and the conditions of their existence. I cited the mid-century author L'Abbé Pluche as someone who promoted these examples in the context of natural theology in his immensely popular Spectacle de la nature, a work Lamarck owned. I also included a 1792 illustration of a shore bird from Senegal, Ardea gularis (the same illustration that appears on the cover of the book). My interpretation at the time I wrote The Spirit of System (and now as well) is that examples of adaptation such as these came to be of special interest to Lamarck only after he reached the conclusion that species change; that is, they were not instrumental in his coming to that idea in the first place. These examples—the swimming bird, the perching bird, and the shore bird with long, stilt-like legs—were the stock-in-trade of discussions of how well suited animals are to the conditions o f their existence. O n c e Lamarck had decided that species change in response to changing environmental conditions, he proceeded to offer these familiar examples of bird adaptation as illustrations of how, in his opinion, species change takes place. It is useful to stress the distinction between the conclusion that evolution takes place and the mechanism or mechanisms offered to explain how it takes place. The distinction is clearer chronologically

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in Darwin's case than in Lamarck's, and clearer still in the case of Alfred Russel Wallace. By July 1837 Darwin had come to believe in species change and soon began entertaining various ideas about how it might take place, but it was not until October of 1838 that he came to the idea of natural selection. In Wallace's case the gap between becoming a convinced evolutionist and coming to what he regarded to be a plausible mechanism for species change was larger—from 1845 to 1858. Lamarck's first announcement of his belief in organic mutability and his first suggestion of how it takes place occurred in the same lecture—his introductory lecture of 1800—but the distinction still seems to me to be a critical one for exploring the development of Lamarck's thought. I believe that the idea of species change came to him before the mechanism he offered to explain it, though having the mechanism ready enough at hand would obviously have reinforced the first conclusion. 12 Let us return now to the subject of Lamarck's birds. Pietro Corsi in his book The Age of Lamarck (1983/1988) claims that Lamarck's attention was focused on birds by two turn-of-the-century French ornithologists, F r a n ç o i s L e v a i l l a n t a n d F r a n ç o i s - M a r i e D a u d i n . Citing Levaillant's view that habits depend upon form, and observing that Daudin in 1800 referred specifically to how the structures of wading birds, swimming birds, and birds of prey correspond to their feeding habits, Corsi concludes that Lamarck in his choice of bird examples and in his interpretation of them was responding to these two authors. Speculating that "Lamarck may have been seeking to join the debate on bird classification," and commenting that Lamarck's observations "seem almost to be a point-by-point reply to Daudin's assertions," Corsi ultimately concludes that Lamarck "paraphrased Levaillant and Daudin's descriptions, used the same terms as the two authors (habits, needs, modes of life), and clearly indicated to his readers his proposed reversal of interpretation." 13 A closer look at the texts of Levaillant a n d D a u d i n a n d t h e ornithological literature of the late eighteenth century does not support these claims. Corsi reached his conclusions after looking only (as he himself acknowledges) at the literature of the turn of the century. When Lamarck's statements are compared not only with those of Levaillant and Daudin but with those of other writers on ornithology, the conclusion that Lamarck was responding to Levaillant and Daudin ceases to be compelling. Levaillant's and Daudin's statements are weaker than comparable statements about bird structures and habits that appear in books Lamarck owned (he did not own the

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works of Levaillant or Daudin). Furthermore, the comments by Levaillant a n d Daudin are not overly conspicuous in the books where they appear, that is, they do not represent the central theme or problématique of either author's work. The reason I believe this topic deserves careful attention is that overstating the likely importance to Lamarck of the works of Levaillant and Daudin confuses the issue of the dynamics of Lamarck's thought in the years that his transformist views initially took shape. Levaillant's superbly illustrated Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique (1799-1808) was devoted to portraying the birds he had seen and collected in South Africa and to voicing his unhappiness about not having his efforts either rewarded by the government or appreciated by ornithologists who had not done the intensive kind of work he had done. It is not a matter of theory that animates his discourse so much as a matter of practice. He complains of having sacrificed not only his fortune but more important his youth to the progress of ornithology. Assembling his naturalist's cabinet, he says, has taken him thirty years, five of them in the "burning deserts of Africa." It is not simply a matter of having shot and collected many of these birds himself; it is also that he has had the opportunity to observe their habits. Other ornithologists, he claims, have erred in identifying the natural relations of certain birds because they were unfamiliar with the birds' behavior. Levaillant is particularly bothered by those who have pronounced authoritatively on ornithological matters without employing any of the time, means, and perseverance that the study of living birds in their native lands requires. Noting mistakes by Brisson and Buffon, among others, he urges his readers: "Let us study the ways of life (mœurs) of animals. Let us follow them in their private life and in their habits. It is then that the affinities (rapports) they have with one another will not escape us, and we will know their true places [in the series of beings], those that nature has assigned them." This, and not the question of the dependence of habits on forms, is the recurrent issue of Levaillant's text.14 As for Daudin's Traité élémentaire et complet d'ornithologie of 1800, it was designed, the author says, for natural history amateurs and for voyagers. It provides instructions for naturalist-voyagers on how to study bird habits ("les mœurs des Oiseaux"). At one point early in the book, at the end of a long paragraph running to three pages, Daudin makes the statement that Corsi identifies as being so similar to Lamarck's: One can recognize in part, from the external form of birds, what their food is. At least it is standard that all those with elongated feet and necks go to aquatic

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places, to marshes or watery fields, to find worms and small reptiles. The species whose digits are united by a large membrane swim on the water's surface to catch fish. Finally, those whose digits are armed with strong, hooked claws and whose beaks are formed of strong, cutting mandibles live by violence (rapine) on weak animals they kill with their blows. 15

What is interesting about this passage is that it is not really as close to Lamarck's as might appear at first glance. There is a difference in emphasis—Daudin focuses on what the birds eat, whereas Lamarck pays almost exclusive attention to the birds' feet, including the lack of feathers on the legs of the wading bird. At least as significant, only two of the three categories of birds cited by Lamarck and Daudin are the same. Whereas Daudin is talking about birds of prey, Lamarck is talking about perching birds, a wholly different subdivision of the bird class as far as ornithologists of the time were concerned. Lamarck's focus on birds' feet could scarcely have been m o r e traditional. In choosing this focus Lamarck was in effect attending to the standard set of characters used by naturalists in search of a methodical ordering of the birds. From Brisson in 1760 to Cuvier in 1798 and Lacépède in 1799, birds' feet were the domin a n t c h a r a c t e r in avian systematics. T h u s when o n e c o n s u l t s Brisson's Ornithologie of 1760, the five-volume treatise that set the model for bird classification in France (while Buffon's work set the model for bird histories), one finds that the first distinction Brisson makes is to divide birds into two major groups: the fissipeds, without membranes uniting their digits, and the palmipeds, with membranes uniting their digits. He then divides the fissipeds into those with feathers down to their claws and those with the lower parts of their legs "denuded" of feathers. The first four plates in his work are striking illustrations of different kinds of bird feet. The details of his system need not detain us f u r t h e r here, but the focus on the feet of birds needs to be underscored. Lamarck owned Brisson's Ornithologie. He also owned Cuvier's Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux of 1798. Cuvier's work was necessarily of great interest to Lamarck because of how closely his own reworking of invertebrate classification d e p e n d e d u p o n the anatomical considerations Cuvier was bringing to bear on the organization and classification of different invertebrate forms. Cuvier's treatm e n t of birds was in no way as novel as his reworking of the old Linnaean class of "worms" (he acknowledged his strong reliance on the works of both Linnaeus and Buffon in the ornithological system he set

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forth), but it is still worth noting the six families of birds he identified: (1) swimming birds; (2) shore birds ("les oiseaux de rivage"—the same phrase used by Lamarck); (3) birds of prey; (4) gallinaceous birds; (5) perching birds; and (6) passerines. Feet played a dominant role in Cuvier's identification of these families. Given the prominence of bird feet in ornithological systematics in the late eighteenth century, there is little reason to think that a passing reference in Daudin's treatise would have served as the signal that focused Lamarck's attention on them. As for statements about the close relation among structures, functions, habits, and organization, the literature of the last quarter of the century, ornithological and otherwise, abounds with them. Thus Vicq-d'Azyr wrote at the beginning o f his discussion on the organization of birds in the Encyclopédie méthodique (1792): "Here we must consider especially the habits, the needs, and the functions proper to the different classes of birds," and then he repeated the point: 'The difference in habits supposes a very great one in organization." 16 Similarly, Mauduyt, the author of the ornithology section of the first volume on "Histoire naturelle" of the Encyclopédie méthodique (1782), claimed on the very first page of his contribution that the habits and mœurs of birds are the result of their organization, and that an attentive observer could thus deduce a bird's way of life from its external appearance. 17 Was Lamarck's use of bird examples in 1800 inspired by Vicq-d'Azyr or Mauduyt? The catalogue of the sale of Lamarck's library indicates with regard to Lamarck's 119-volume set of the Encyclopédie méthodique, "Notes by M. de Lamarck are to be found on several volumes of natural history." Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing which volumes or passages Lamarck annotated. Likewise, we cannot be sure that Lamarck read the ornithological section of the Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature, published by the Abbé Bonnaterre in 1790. This work speaks even more forcefully than Mauduyt's about how the habits and ways of life of birds are a necessary effect of their organization. Near the end of his introductory remarks Bonnaterrre observes: To complete this article it remains for us to offer a very important observation on the manner of life of birds; it is that their habits and modes of life are not as free as one might imagine. Their conduct is not the product of a pure freedom of will, nor even a result of choice, but a necessary effect deriving from the conformation of the organization and exercise of their physical faculties. Each of them is determined and fixed in the manner of living that this necessity imposes on them. None seeks not to respect it, and none strays from it. It is through this necessity, quite as

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varied as the birds' forms, that all the districts of nature are inhabited. T h e eagle never leaves its cliffs, nor the heron its shores; the one swoops down from the skies on the lamb that it carries off or tears apart, by the sole right that the strength o f its weapons gives to it and by the use that it makes of its cruel talons; the other, its feet in the mud, awaits, commanded by need, the passage of its fugitive prey. 18

We can conclude from all this that the bird examples Lamarck chose in 1800 were very familiar ones. I would argue that he chose the examples he did not because they were related to a new debate on the relations between habits and forms, not because these particular examples involved a contested issue of bird classification, and not because they had anything to do with his coming to believe in species mutability in the first place. There is nothing in his writings or his practice as a naturalist to suggest that the writings of either of these men or any pressing ornithological problématique of the day intersected with his thought or practice in such a way as to inspire his belief in organic mutability.19 In contrast, as I argue in the main text, Lamarck's special area of expertise, the study of shells, brought him to the very center of the dramatic debates of his day about species extinction. In the late 1790s fossil specimens were the primary materials on which the struggle to speak authoritatively about the earth's history was based. The set of issues relating to this particular area of Lamarck's expertise was critical in bringing him to the idea of species mutability. Saying that Lamarck's work with fossil shells was central to the inspiration of his belief in species mutability is not the same as saying that he extrapolated his broad view of the successive production of all organic forms from the idea that some forms have changed in response to changing circumstances. Nor is it the same as saying that the consideration of fossils necessarily led him to the particular mechanism or mechanisms of organic change that he eventually announced. But once he came to the idea that species change, an idea that for him was closely bound up with the fossil evidence for climatic change, he was not far from the preliminary identification at least of a mechanism explaining how species change. One much-discussed source of the idea that changes in habit can produce changes in form was the evidence from the domestication of animals and plants. Buffon, for example, described how domestication had changed the forms of ducks and geese. 20 Related to this topic of domestication were various late-eighteenth-century discussions of animal perfectibility and human perfectibility. T h e latter discussions revolved in no small measure around contemporary ideas regarding the development of human understanding.

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L a m a r c k scholars have l o n g recognized the similarity between Lamarck's transformist ideas and those of P.J.G. Cabanis, and they have properly identified Cabanis with the tradition of Locke a n d Condillac, which viewed h u m a n understanding as being built u p from sensory impressions. While historians of science have often stressed the importance of Condillac's ideas on language for French scientific reform in the late eighteenth century, what is important here (a point previously made by Robert J. Richards) is just how much the whole Lamarckian discourse relating needs, habits, circumstances, faculties, and organization parallels what Condillac and his followers had to say about the development of the mind. 21 Condillac's La Logique (another work Lamarck owned) begins with a discussion of needs and faculties. Condillac wrote: "The needs and the faculties are properly what we call the nature of each animal; and by that we mean nothing other than that the animal is born with such n e e d s a n d such faculties. But because these n e e d s a n d faculties d e p e n d on organization, and vary with it, we as a consequence unders t a n d t h e n a t u r e of an a n i m a l to m e a n t h e c o n f o r m a t i o n of its organs." 2 2 Earlier, in his Traité des animaux, Condillac h a d related habits to needs and explained why the instincts of animals were often surer than the reason of humans: "Having few needs, they [animals] contract only a small n u m b e r of habits: doing always the same things, they do them better." It was the variety of circumstances to which people were subjected, Condillac said, that required them to have reason. Reason aided them where their habits were inadequate. 2 3 Among Condillac's disciples was Charles-Georges Leroy, the keeper of the king's game at Versailles. As a hunter who knew well the behavior of many wild animals, Leroy had no doubt that animals were capable of intelligent action. What proved this was their ability to respond to novel circumstances. He wrote in his Lettres philosophiques sur l'intelligence et la perfectibilité des animaux that in order to have "the complete history of an animal," one needed not only to know its "essential character, its natural appetites, its manner of living, and so on" but also to observe it under all the circumstances that might force it to invent new means of satisfying its needs. From observations of the "daily life" of several species in the wild, h e concluded: "We have seen their knowledge expand with their needs; and their intelligence, when it is stimulated by necessity, make all the progress that their organization can allow."24 In arguing that animals were perfectible, Leroy was not suggesting that existing animal species could be transformed into new ones. The extent to which a species could be perfected, he insisted, was limited

Lamarck in 1995 by its organization. Thus he wrote: "It is impossible that animals, destined by n a t u r e f o r d e t e r m i n e d ends, and organized accordingly, should not be constrained within circles allocated to their species, in accordance with their needs and means." 25 He was prepared to admit, however, that at least some of the innate dispositions of a species might be the result of habits acquired over time. In his words: "There is another observation to make on some of the dispositions we consider innate and purely mechanical. It is that they are perhaps absolutely d e p e n d e n t on habits acquired by the ancestors of the individual that we see today. It is proven, by incontestable facts, that a n u m b e r of dispositions acquired solely through education, when they become habitual and when they have been maintained consecutively in two or three subjects, become almost always hereditary." 26 There is no reason to suppose that Lamarck read Leroy or got the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters from him. Independendy of Leroy (it seems safe to assume), Lamarck regarded the inheritance of acquired characters as so well established that there was n o reason to question it. What he eventually did question, however, was the idea that the mutability of forms was confined within the limits assigned by their organization. After embracing the idea of slow b u t continuous and inexorable geological change, necessarily changing the circumstances to which the members of a species were subjected, Lamarck endorsed and extended a mechanism of organic transformation that had previously been used to account for small-scale, circumscribed changes in animal behavior and structure. T h e bird examples Lamarck chose were above all of pedagogical value: they were highly familiar and easily understandable illustrations of the close interrelation of habits and structures. They were examples his students would readily recognize. To challenge the prevailing idea that organisms were designed for specific purposes, that their structures d e t e r m i n e d their habits, it was highly appropriate for him to refer to standard illustrations of that claim. Significantly, Lamarck never enlisted in support of his transformist ideas the argument that habits can be of use in classifying organisms. This is a f u r t h e r indication that it was n o t a debate about classification that was at issue. It also underscores the significance of thinking about practice. Lamarck was a cabinet naturalist. As such, h e worked almost exclusively with dead specimens. He used the evidence of comparative anatomy, of internal structures, to determine the organizational differences on which large divisions (notably classes) should be based. H e preserved a place for external characters in the determination of

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distinctions at the level of the species and the genus. But given the animals h e studied and the conditions under which he studied them, the occasions for animal habits to feature prominently in his classificatory decisions were limited. Although my conclusions here offer a different interpretation than that set forth by Pietro Corsi in his book The Age of Lamarck, it is Corsi's excellent work that has inspired this closer look at the ornithological literature of the time. Continuing to delve more deeply into the scientific and philosophical literature of Lamarck's day, considering further n o t only Lamarck's theorizing but his actual practice as a naturalist, and paying increasing attention to the diversity of the theoretical, practical, institutional, and other stakes at issue in French natural history in the age of Lamarck, hold, I believe, considerable promise for Lamarck studies in the future.

NOTES 1. Natalie Angier, "Heredity's more than genes, new theory proposes," New York Times, January 3, 1955, B, pp. 5 and 9; Eytan Avital and Evajablonka, "Social learning and the evolution of behavior," Animal Behavior, 48 (1994), 1195-1199. In this particular instance, the reference to Lamarck appears only in the New York Times article, not in the scientific paper itself. 2. The earlier Colloque international "Lamarck" (1971) remains useful as a collection of conference proceedings. For biographical information on Lamarck, Marcel Landrieu's Lamarck, le fondateur du transformisme (Paris, 1909) still remains the most helpful single source. 3. Cited in Landrieu, Lamarck, le fondateur du transformisme, p. 52, fn. 4. Pietro Corsi, The age of Lamarck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 117. 5. Charles C. Gillispie, "Lamarck and Darwin in the history of science," in Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr., eds., Forerunners of Darwin: 1745-1859 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), p. 271. Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: the history of an idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 80. 6. The current classic is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). See also the influential work of Bruno Latour, Science in action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), and, with respect to natural history in particular, D. Stemerding, "How to make oneself nature's spokesman? A Latourian account of classification in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century natural history," Biology and Philosophy, 8 (1993), 193-223. For Lamarck's practice as a cabinet naturalist identifying and distinguishing species, see Goulven Laurent, "La notion d'espèce chez les paléontologistes français du xixème siècle," in Scott

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Atran et al., Histoire du concept d'espèce dans les säences de la vie, Colloque international (mai 1985) organisé par la Fondation Singer-Polignac (Paris: Fondation Singer-Polignac, 1987), pp. 141-159; and Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., "Lamarck and species," ibid., pp. 161-180. 7. See especially M.-N. Bourguet, "La collecte du monde"; J a n e t Browne, "Science of empire: British natural history and voyages"; Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., " T h e ménagerie and the life of the Muséum"; Dorinda Outram, "Patronage networks and structures of controversy at the Muséum, 1795-1830"; Martin J. S. Rudwick, "Recherches sur les ossemene fossiles: Georges Cuvier and the collecting of international allies"; Philip Sloan, "Transporting m u s e u m styles: the Paris Muséum comes to London"; and Emma Spary, "The spectacle of nature: public control and Revolutionary vision in the Jacobin Muséum"; all in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). 8. In addition to the papers cited in the discussion of Lamarck's botany, see the papers by Claude Dupuis and Damien Hanriot, Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994; forthcoming). 9. Henri Daudin, De Linné àjussieu: méthodes de classification et idée de série en botanique et en zoologie (1740-1790) (Paris: Félix Alean, n.d. [1926]) a n d Cuvier et Lamarck: les classes zoologiques et l'idée de sène animale (1790-1830), 2 vols. (Paris: Félix Alean, 1926). 10. This discussion is an elaboration of a section of my p a p e r entitled "Animal behavior and organic mutability in the age of Lamarck," presented in December 1988 at the conference "Lamarck e il Lamarckismo" in Naples. 11. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Système des animaux sans vertèbres (1801), p. 15. 12. On the early development of Darwin's idea of natural selection see M.J.S. Hodge and David Kohn, "The immediate origins of natural selection," in David Kohn, ed., The Darwinian heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 185-206. With regard to Lamarck it is important to recognize that his broad transformist vision was not simply an extrapolation from the idea that species change but involved the additional idea of the successive production of forms from the simplest to the most complex (see pp. 136-137). As also indicated in the main text, Lamarck's discourse of 1800 does not yet display all the elements of his mature, transformist system. Most important, he does not identify the "power of life" and explain how it makes life forms increasingly complex, and though he endorses spontaneous or "direct" generation, he does not in 1800 explain how it comes about. These elaborations of his theory first appeared in his Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivans of 1802. 13. Corsi, The age of Lamarck, pp. 95-100. 14. F r a n ç o i s Levaillant, Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique, 6 vols. (Paris: J. J. Fuchs, 1799-1808). See especially vol. I, pp. vii-xi (quote on p. x); vol. II, pp. 135-138 (quote on p. 138). It may be observed that the particularly striking examples Levaillant offers of bird habits or the relations of habits to structures (notably in the cases of the secretary bird, vol. I, pp. 104-105, and

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t h e A m e r i c a n versus t h e A f r i c a n starlings, vol. II, p. 137) a r e e x a m p l e s Lamarck might well have been attracted to if Levaillant's writings had been as i m p o r t a n t for him as Corsi suggests, but Lamarck never mentions them. Corsi attributes to Levaillant a quote critical of Buffon's ideas a b o u t the production of living forms (Age of Lamarck, p. 95, citing Levaillant, vol. II, pp. 137-138, 191), but the quote is n o t to be f o u n d in Levaillant on the pages cited, and without knowing its proper source and context it is difficult to know what to make of it. 15. F.-M. Daudin, Traite élémentaire et complet d'ornithologie, 2 vols. (Paris: Bertrandet, 1800), vol. I, pp. 15-16. Corsi's presentation of the quote sounds more like Lamarck because Corsi extends it with a selected part of a passage from eight pages later in Daudin's work (vol. I, p. 23). 16. Félix Vicq-d'Azyr, Encyclopédie méthodique. Système anatomique. Quadrupèdes, 2 (Paris: Panckoucke, 1792), pp. lxiii, lxiv. 17. Mauduyt, "Ornithologie, plan de l'ouvrage," Encyclopédie méthodique, 1 (Paris: Panckoucke, 1782), p. 321. When Mauduyt proceeded to give examples of the influence of constitution upon habits and mœurs, the first he provided was that of a wading bird, the heron (p. 366). It may be worth noting that whereas Daudin in 1800 was to state simply that one could recognize a bird's eating habits from its external form, Mauduyt in 1782 states more forcefully that habits are the result of organization. 18. L'Abbé Bonnaterre, Tableau encyclopédique et méthodique des trois règnes de la nature. Ornithologie (Paris: Panckoucke, 1790), p. xliii. 19. Lamarck was personally acquainted with both Levaillant and Daudin. It is the evidence that their work constituted part of a natural history "debate" that would have influenced Lamarck in the way Corsi claims that is at issue here. 20. See Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., "Le comportement animal et l'idéologie de domestication chez Buffon et chez les éthologues modernes," in Jean Gayon, ed., Buffon 88. Actes du colloque international pour le bicentenaire de la mort de Buffon (Paris: Vrin, 1992), pp. 569-582. 21. See Picavet, Les Idéologues; Giulio Barsanti, Dalla stona naturale alla storia della natura: saggio su Lamarck (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979); Ludmilla Jordanova, Lamarck (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Robert J. Richards, "Influence of sensationalist tradition on early theories of the evolution of behavior, "Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979), 85-105. 22. Etienne de Condillac, La Logique, trans. W. R. Albury, (New York: Abaris Books, 1980), pp. 48, 50. 23. Etienne de Condillac, Traité des animaux, in Oeuvres de Condillac, 23 vols. (Paris: Ch. Houel, 1798), pp. 555-557. 24. Charles-Georges Leroy, Lettres philosophiques sur l'intelligence et la perfectibilité des animaux, avec quelques lettres sur l'homme (Paris: Bossange, Masson et Besson, 1802), pp. 7, 89. T h e first edition of this work was published anonymously in 1768 as the work of a "physicien de Nuremberg." 25. Leroy, p. 224. 26. Ibid., pp. 227-228.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abbri, Ferdinando. "Tradizioni di recerca e forme di sapere: Lamarck e la chimica." Rivista di storia della sàenza, 1 (1993), 1-25. Allorge-Boiteau, Lucile. "Apports de Lamarck à la systématique des plantes supérieures," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Appel, Toby A. The Cuvier-Geoffroy debate: French biology in the decades before Dartvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Aymonin, Gérard G. "L'herbier de Lamarck." Revue d'histoire des sciences, 34 (1981), 25-58. Bange, Christian. "Théorie et pratique de la taxonomie végétale chez Lamarck et ses continuateurs," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Barsanti, Giulio. Dalla stona naturale alla stona della natura: saggio su Lamarck. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. . "Linné at Buffon: deux visions différentes de la nature et de l'histoire naturelle." Revue de synthèse, third series, nos. 113-114 (1984), 83-111. . "Lamarck and the birth of biology," in Stefano Poggi and Maurizio Bossi, eds., Romanticism in saence: science in Europe, 1790-1840. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publications, 1994, pp. 47-74. . "Le scimmie di Lamarck." Proceedings of the conference "Lamarck e il Lamarckismo." Istituto Italiano per gli studi filosofici, Naples, December 1988 (forthcoming). Barthélemy-Madaule, Madeleine. Lamarck, ou le mythe du précurseur. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979. English translation: Lamarck, the mythical precursor: a study of the relations between science and ideology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1982. Bénichou, Claude, and Claude Blanckaert, eds. fulien-foseph Vtrey: naturaliste et anthropologue. Paris: Vrin, 1988. Bourguet, M.-N. "La collecte du monde," in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: the history of an idea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Browne, Janet. "Science of empire: British natural history and voyages," in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). Burkhardt, Richard W., Jr. "Lamarck's understanding of animal behavior," in Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Colloque international dans le cadre du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches interdisciplinaires de Chantilly. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 11-28. . "The zoological philosophy ofJ. Β. Lamarck," i n j . Β. Lamarck, Zoological philosophy: an exposition with regard to the natural history of animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. xv-xxix

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. The politics of evolution: morphology, mediane, and reform in radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Drouin, Jean-Marc. "Lamarck, ou le naturaliste philosophe." Corpus, 3 (1986), 29-35. . "Lamarck vu par Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Dupuis, Claude. "Pierre André Latreille (1762-1833): the foremost entomologist of his time." Annual Review ofEntomology, 19 (1974), 1-13. . "Acualité de Lamarck taxinomiste," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Duris, Pascal. "Lamarck et la botanique linnéenne," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Faure, Jean-Pierre. Le Cas Lamarck. Paris: Albert Blanchard; Perigueux: Pierre Fanlac, 1978. Goux, Jean-Michel. "Darwin et la théorie de l'évolution." Pensée (Paris), 291 (1993), 89-104. Grassé, Pierre-Paul. "Dieu et la nature dans la pensée de Lamarck," in Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 203-212. Hanriot, Damien. "Lamarck et les zoophytes," Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Hull, David. "Lamarck among the Anglos," i n j . Β. Lamarck, Zoological philosophy: an exposition unth regard to the natural history of animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. xl-lxvi. Jolinon, Jean-Claude, and A. Raynal-Roques. "Le botaniste Lamarck et les herbiers," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Jordanova, Ludmilla. "The natural philosophy of Lamarck in its historical context." Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge, 1976. . "La psychologie naturaliste et le 'problème des niveaux.' La notion du sentiment intérieur chez Lamarck," in Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 69-80. . Lamarck. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. . "Nature's powers: a reading of Lamarck's distinction between creation and production," in James R. Moore, ed., History, humanity, and evolution: essays for John C. Greene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 71-98. Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Colloque international dans le cadre du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches interdisciplinaires de Chantilly. Paris: Vrin, 1981. Laurent, Goulven. "Paléontologie et évolution en France de Lamarck à Darwin." Thèse de Doctorat d'Etat, Université Paris I, 1984. Published as Paléontologie

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et évolution en France: 1800-1860. Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1987. . "Virey et le transformisme," in Claude Bénichou and Claude Blanckaert, cài., Julien-Joseph Virey: naturaliste et anthropologue. Paris: Vrin, 1988, pp. 61-96. . "Idées sur l'origine de l'homme en France de 1800 à 1871 entre Lamarck et Darwin." Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, nouvelle série, 1, nos. 3-4 (1989), 105-130. . "Biogéographie et paléontologie en France au XIXe siècle: acteurs et débats." Revue d'histoire sàences, 45 (1992), 389-417. Légée, Georgette, and Michel Guédès. "Lamarck botaniste et evolutionniste." Histoire naturelle, 17-18 (1980-1981), 19-31. Leroy, Jean-François. "Le botaniste Lamarck en 1778 et la pensée biologique au XVIIIe siècle (quelques remarques)," in Michel Delsol et al., Hommage au Professeur Pierre-Paul Grassé. Paris: Masson, 1987, pp. 43-55. Outram, Dorinda. Georges Cuvier: vocation, sàence, and authority in post-revolutionary France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. . "Uncertain legislator: Georges Cuvier's laws of nature in their intellectual context." Journal of the History of Biology, 19 (1986), 323-368. . "Patronage networks and structures of controversy at the Muséum, 1795-1830," in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). Piveteau, Jean. "Lamarck et Cuvier, l'échelle des êtres," in Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 189-197. . "L'idée de nature chez Buffon et chez Lamarck," in Michel Delsol et al., Hommage au Professeur Pierre-Paul Orasse. Paris: Masson, 1987, pp. 37-42. Richards, Robert J. "Influence of sensationalist tradition on early theories of the evolution of behavior." Journal of the History of Ideas, 40 (1979), 85-105. . Darwin and the emergence of evolutionary theories of mind and behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Roger, Jacques. "Chimie et biologie: des 'molécules organiques' de Buffon à la 'physico-chimie' de Lamarck." History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 1 (1979), 41-64. . "Lamarck etjean-jacques Rousseau." Gesnerus, 42 (1985), 369-381. Rudwick, Martin J. S. The meaning offossils: episodes in the history ofpaleontology. New York: Science History Publications, 1972. . "Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles: Georges Cuvier and the collecting of international allies," in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). Russo, R. P. "La notion d'organisation chez Lamarck," Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 233-249. Secord, James A. "Edinburgh Lamarckians: Robert Jameson and Robert E. Grant." Journal of the History of Biology, 24 (1991), 1-18. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. "Why Lamarck did not discover the principle of natural selection." Journal of the History of Biology, 15 (1982), 443-465.

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Sloan, Phillip. "Transporting museum styles: the Paris Muséum comes to London," in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). . "Lamarck in Britain: transforming Lamarck's transformism," in Colloque Lamarck (119 e congrès des sociétés historiques et scientifiques, Amiens, 26-30 octobre 1994) (forthcoming). Spary, Emma. "The spectacle of nature: public control and Revolutionary vision in the Jacobin Muséum," in Roger Chartier, ed., Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire. Bicentenaire du Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, 1793-1993 (forthcoming). Szyfman, Léon. "La révolution accomplie par Lamarck dans les sciences naturelles et philosophiques," in Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 103-116. .Jean-Baptiste Lamarck et son époque. Paris: Masson, 1982. Vachon, Max. "Lamarck professeur," in Lamarck et son temps; Lamarck et notre temps. Paris: Vrin, 1981, pp. 233-249.

THE D OF

;YSTE

FIGURES Naturalist's museum of the seventeenth century Frontispiece of Dezallier d'Argenville's Daubenton

16

Conchyliologie

20

Plan of the J a r d i n d u Roi

28

Arrangement of specimens for visual effect Bust of Linnaeus at the J a r d i n d u Roi

31

35

Lamarck's table showing the "true order of gradation" the plant kingdom 56 Testing the effects of electricity on plants and animals Lamarck's table illustrating how the different minerals are formed 70 Great fossil reptile jaw of Maestricht Ibis skeleton

118

149

T h e order of production of living things Shore bird

173

T h e origin of different animals Cuvier Lacépède

176

192 205

Lamarck the year before his death

216

163

Introduction

T h e French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is not one of the forgotten figures in the history of science. He is typically associated with the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, exemplified by a Kiplingesque account of how the giraffe got its long neck, and with two notorious episodes in twentieth-century biology: the Kammerer affair, which involved the forgery of scientific evidence, and the Lysenko affair, which involved the repression of scientific thought. These associations have enhanced interest in Lamarck as a historical figure. By and large, however, the ways in which Lamarck has been remembered fail to illuminate either the nature of his own work or the scientific problems of his day. If Lamarck's thought is to be appreciated in its own historical context, certain common assumptions regarding what was central to his thought must be revised. Lamarck did believe in the idea for which he is most famous: the idea that somatic modifications resulting from an organism's development of particular habits may be passed on to that organism's offspring under the appropriate conditions. This is the idea that has come to be known as the "inheritance of acquired characters." But this idea was neither one which Lamarck originated nor one for which he claimed special credit. What is more, in his own day, he was not criticized for holding it. His contemporaries took exception to his claim that organic change could proceed beyond the limits of the species type, but they did not doubt that within these limits

2

The Spirit of System

the results of habit tended to become hereditary. For them, as for Lamarck himself, the reality of the inheritance of acquired characters was not an issue. The reality of the inheritance of acquired characters did not become an issue until three quarters of a century later, in the 1880s, when the German embryologist August Weismann distinguished sharply between the body and germ cells of the organism and questioned whether characters acquired by the body cells could ever be transmitted to the germ cells and thus passed on to the next generation. It was then that the inheritance of acquired characters came to be commonly identified as the "Lamarckian" or "neoLamarckian" mechanism of organic change, in contrast to the "Darwinian" or "neo-Darwinian" view that evolution proceeds through the natural selection of small, fortuitous variations. Charles Darwin himself, as his contemporaries were well aware, believed that the effects of habit could become hereditary, and he had granted such inheritance an important role in organic change. When the names were assigned to the theoretical positions, however, this detail was considered negligible. Darwin's position was "purified" and Lamarck's name became indissolubly bound to an idea which was much less a concern of his own than a concern of the biologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The example of the giraffe, like the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, looms larger in modern renderings of Lamarck's theory than it did in Lamarck's own. Lamarck used the example to illustrate the effect of habit upon organic form. He maintained that the giraffe's extraordinarily long neck and forelegs were the result of the constant efforts of the giraffe's ancestors to reach upward to browse upon the leaves of trees. But this example was simply one of many he offered to help explain part of the evolutionary process. Indeed, unlike the tortoises and finches of the Galapagos and their apparent importance in stimulating Darwin's evolutionary views, the giraffe seems not to have been a stimulus to Lamarck's evolutionary theory but instead only an afterthought. Lamarck first mentioned the giraffe in 1802 in the index to his Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivans after he had already set out in the main text other examples of the importance of habit for organic change. 1 Lamarck's contemporaries paid less attention to the giraffe example than to the others, recognizing all the while that Lamarck's theory was concerned not only with adaptive change at the species level but also with the origin of life, the different levels

Introduction

3

of organic complexity, and the faculties associated with specific organic structures. Today, however, the major features of Lamarck's biological theorizing have been forgotten while the giraffe example remains to caricature Lamarck's thinking. As for the association of Lamarck's name with the Kammerer and Lysenko affairs, this is simply a function of the historical accident through which the inheritance of acquired characters came to be identified as the "Lamarckian" principle. The first of these episodes took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century and centered about the attempt to prove the inheritance of acquired characters experimentally. It came to a dramatic head in 1926, with the announcement that evidence the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer had offered in support of the inheritance of acquired characters had been faked. Six weeks after this announcement Kammerer shot himself. The second episode extended from the 1930s to the 1960s and involved the virtual destruction of genetics in the Soviet Union under the scientific dictatorship of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Profoundly ignorant of the content and methods of contemporary biology, Lysenko espoused one recognizable scientific idea: the inheritance of acquired characters. Lamarck himself, it should go without saying, is not to be blamed for either the Kammerer or the Lysenko affair. Nor was Lamarck's situation comparable to that of either Kammerer or Lysenko. The guiding issues of Lamarck's work were not the guiding issues of the work of the two most famous "Lamarckians" of the twentieth century, and though each of the three cases involved a kind of "politics," Lamarck's position in the scientific community differed significantly from Kammerer's or Lysenko's. The debate over the inheritance of acquired characters in which Kammerer was involved would have taken place whether or not Lamarck had ever written upon organic evolution. This debate arose in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a natural response to the problem of the source of heritable variations, a problem left unresolved by Darwin in his Origin of Species. At the beginning of the twentieth century the debate was still going on. Neither Weismann's theoretical arguments nor his often cited experiment involving the amputation of mouse tails for several successive generations had sufficed to overcome the widely held belief that at least some kinds of environmentally induced modifications could be transmitted from one generation to the next. The neo-Lamarckians were able to call upon a wide variety of circum-

4

The Spirit of System

stantial evidence in support of their position. Until the twentieth century, however, they could cite little experimental evidence in their favor. Not that they felt entirely compelled to do so, since naturalists of the nineteenth century had, by and large, not regarded experimentation as a key to resolving the major issues of organic evolution. But as experimentation came to be increasingly lauded for its importance to biology, the debate over the inheritance of acquired characters was inevitably dragged into the experimental arena. When, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Paul Kammerer came forward with claims of having proved the reality of the Lamarckian principle experimentally, his claims were naturally greeted with enthusiasm by the neo-Lamarckians. It was a staggering blow to the neo-Lamarckian cause in 1926 when the nuptial pads that were purported to be the inheritance of an acquired character in Kammerer's only remaining specimen of "midwife" toad were found instead to be injections of India ink under the toad's skin. Kammerer's suicide shortly thereafter was widely interpreted, correctly or not, as an admission of guilt. 2 By the time Lysenko began endorsing the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, the idea had been widely, if not universally, discredited. This general disenchantment with the Lamarckian principle was the result of a combination of factors: the lack of clear experimental evidence that acquired characters are ever inherited, the lack of a plausible mechanism by which modifications of somatic cells might be transcribed in the germ cells, the taint of fraud resulting from the Kammerer case, and the availability of alternative explanatory frameworks that seemed to render reliance on the Lamarckian principle unnecessary. Nonetheless, Lysenko advanced the battle-worn idea that environmentally induced modifications could be inherited, seeing in it the promise that man could direct organic change. He explained his dissatisfaction with genetics as it had developed in the West in the following terms: "Mendelism-Morganism is built entirely on chance; this 'science' therefore denies the existence of necessary relationships in living nature and condemns practical workers to fruitless waiting. There is no effectiveness in such science. With such a science it is impossible to plan, to work toward a definite goal; it rules out scientific prediction." 3 Lysenko's rise to power has been shown to have been less a function of his biological theories or of Marxist philosophy than of the needs of Soviet agriculture. 4 Lamarck, interestingly enough, be-

Introduction

5

lieved in one of the particular phenomena that brought attention to Lysenko a century and a half later: the alleged conversion of winter wheat into spring wheat. 8 Lamarck, however, never appealed to the practical implications of the inheritance of acquired characters—either agricultural or social—as a reason for believing in such inheritance. Many social theorists have seen in the inheritance of acquired characters a possible foundation for social progress. In the late eighteenth century, Condorcet assumed the inheritance of acquired characters in constructing his vision of the social and organic improvement of mankind. In the nineteenth century Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Engels, and Lester Ward based their respective views of human progress on the Lamarckian principle. In the twentieth century Kammerer did not hesitate to point to the advantages that would accrue to the human race if acquired characters were inherited and if the proper reforms were instituted in society. But Lamarck never expressed such concerns. This may have been because he felt organic change operated too slowly to be effective on a human time scale. It may also have been because he was not particularly interested in social change or because the political events of his day left him skeptical about the prospects of far-reaching social change being achieved. Whatever the case, there is no reason to consider Lamarck an early Lysenko, seeking to dominate both men and nature on the basis of a particular view of nature's operations. But if Lamarck is not to be seen as an early Kammerer or Lysenko —or for that matter as an early Darwin (another perspective which has served to obscure fundamental aspects of Lamarck's thought)— how is he to be seen? If his story does not revolve about the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, be it in the form of giraffes' necks, toads' nuptial pads, or the tails of mice, if he was not resisting the objedification of nature or espousing a social philosophy, and if he was not attempting to write an Origin of Species, what were his basic concerns? Lamarck was active as a scientist in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period in the history of science when the pursuit of knowledge was becoming increasingly specialized but individuals did not necessarily feel constrained to limit themselves to a single field of study. Lamarck distinguished himself first as a botanist and then as an invertebrate zoologist, but he also took it upon himself to ponder fundamental questions regarding

6

The Spirit of System

physics, chemistry, meteorology, geology, and a new science he called "biology." His attempts to lay conceptual foundations for these various fields were received far less enthusiastically by his contemporaries than were his efforts as a classifier of plants and animals. Nonetheless, he regarded his general observations on nature's operations and science's needs to be more valuable than his work as a systematist. He was especially proud of his thinking with respect to his new science of "biology," which though encompassing "everything relating to living things" was especially concerned with the organization of living things and the growing complexity of this organization as the result of the prolonged action of "life's motions."® He felt that in studying "the origin of living bodies a n d . . . the principal causes of the diversity of these bodies and the developments of their organization and faculties" he had tackled not only "the most vast and important goál that one can embrace in the study of nature" but also the problem "that is undeniably the most difficult to resolve."7 Privately, he suggested that his own work in biology would be comparable to Newton's in astronomy. 8 The guiding idea of his biology was that nature had first brought into being the very simplest forms of life and then from these, with the aid of favorable circumstances and a great deal of time, successively produced all the different forms of life on earth. Diverse opinions have been expressed concerning the nature and merits of Lamarck's work. Early in the nineteenth century Lamarck was appreciated more for his systematic than for his speculative endeavors. Later in the century, once the idea of organic evolution gained general acceptance among biologists, he was typically portrayed as a great thinker whose misfortune was to have lived at a time that was not "ripe" for the appreciation of his ideas. Biographers of Lamarck at the turn of the century characteristically set themselves the dual task of rescuing Lamarck from the obscurity into which he had been cast by Cuvier and promoting the cause of the neo-Lamarckian explanation of evolution. 9 In contrast, the American historian of science Charles Gillispie has seen Lamarck not as the insufficiently appreciated founder of modern evolutionary theory but rather as a thinker whose "theory of evolution belongs to the contracting and self-defeating history of subjective science."10 Gillispie has written that Lamarck failed to accept the trend of modern science—to objectify nature by mathematizing it—and that Lamarck, like Lysenko, sought a morality based on nature and thereby invited the domination of science by politics. Gillispie's

Introduction

7

service in indicating that Lamarck might best be understood in some other role than precursor to Charles Darwin has been invaluable. But the particular perspective in which Gillispie put Lamarck's work has been less fortunate. Presenting Lamarck as an object lesson in the difference between good and bad science is little better than treating him as a thinker too far ahead of his time. Neither approach has shed much light on the scientific issues of Lamarck's time or the maneuverings through which different individuals, ideas, and styles of scientific thought were promoted or held in French science at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Since Gillispie's work in the 1950s, Lamarck has received increasing attention from historians of science.11 Lamarck's writings have been reread with some care, and new attempts have been made to evaluate his biological thought on its own terms and in its proper historical context. But there has not been a systematic and detailed study of Lamarck's biological thought in general or evolutionary thought in particular which addresses itself to the range of questions that need to be confronted if Lamarck's place in the history of biology is to be assessed satisfactorily. What role did Lamarck, as a self-styled "naturalist-philosopher," see himself playing? How was his "biology" related to the natural history of his day and to the other fields of science in which he took particular interest? What were the conceptual foundations of his early scientific thought, and in what ways did the evolutionary views he eventually advanced represent a development upon or rejection of these foundations? What was the relation of his evolutionary thought to various eighteenth-century ideas about the origins of organic diversity? What were his personal and intellectual relations with his colleagues, and what was his status within the scientific community during the course of his career? What brought him to a belief in organic mutability in the first place? What were the basic features of the theory of evolution he eventually developed? And how was his theory of evolution received in its own day? Equal weight will not be given here to each of Lamarck's diverse intellectual pursuits. Lamarck's thoughts on physics, chemistry, and meteorology will be examined primarily insofar as they shed light on the general patterns of Lamarck's scientific thought and particular features of his natural history and biology. Lamarck's physicochemical and meteorological systems will be considered, but the treatment of them will be relatively brief. It is the author's judgment that Lamarck's fascination as an historical figure lies in his

8

The Spirit of System

work as a naturalist and biologist and that since Lamarck himself viewed his biological studies as constituting the most interesting part of his work the focus of the present study is justified. Lamarck poses special difficulties for the biographer. No autobiography, diary, or correspondence exists to provide a close view of Lamarck's personality or intellectual development. His published and manuscript works are all devoted to scientific subjects. If passions manifest themselves in his writings, they are primarily the passions of the naturalist-philosopher and academician addressing his attentions to nature on the one hand and his colleagues on the other. From these writings one learns a little about his habits (he arose at five o'clock every morning to take the first of three daily readings of the temperature, atmospheric pressure, and wind direction) and about his health (he found his energies insufficient to support an active physical life and an active mental life at the same time, especially after 1800).12 But his writings disclose very little with respect to his family life, his personal relations with particular colleagues, or his activities during the French Revolution. Some bare biographical data are available. 13 Lamarck was born at Bazentin in Picardy on August 1, 1744, the last of eleven children in a family of noble lineage but modest resources. As the youngest in the family, he found himself destined not for the military, which had provided the careers of his brothers, father, and several generations of forebears, but rather for the priesthood. He attended for a time the Jesuit College at Amiens, but following his father's death in 1759 and the expulsion of the Jesuits from France in 1761 he was no longer restrained from joining the army, and he proceeded to enlist. He pursued a military career from 1761 until 1768, when an injury forced him to resign. Upon leaving the army he spent some time at his family's home at Bazentin and then went to Paris, where he eventually embarked upon a scientific career. The basic outline of Lamarck's career is known and will be set out in later chapters. We also know that Lamarck had six children by one woman before he married her on her deathbed in 1792; that he later had at least two more wives and two more children; that one of his sons died of yellow fever, a second was deaf, and a third was insane; that he himself was completely blind, as well as impoverished, for the last eleven years of his life; that his daughter Rosalie stayed with him and cared for him until his death in 1829; and that after his death, his son Auguste criticized him for failing to attend to the needs of his family. 14

Introduction

9

A complete and vivid portrait of Lamarck as a person cannot be drawn from the writings of Lamarck's contemporaries any more than it can be drawn from Lamarck's scientific studies. His contemporaries' writings contain only fleeting glimpses of him, and the brief obituary notices that followed his death tend to reveal more about their authors than they do about Lamarck. The few incidents in which Lamarck's behavior has been recorded show Lamarck to have been like most mortals: capable of pettiness as well as generosity, of frailty as well as strength. One visitor to Paris was taken aback by the way Lamarck "always took occasion to attack, with violence, what he knew to be my most favourite sentiments." 15 But other naturalists discovered Lamarck to be entirely gracious and quite willing to go out of his way to help them when they needed to examine his collections.16 Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle, seeking election to the prestigious first class of the Institut de France (the successor to the Académie des Sciences) was dismayed to find that when it came to filling a vacancy in the botany section Lamarck succumbed to pressure from Fourcroy and failed to vote for de Candolle, even though Lamarck regarded de Candolle's work to be superior to that of the rival candidate. 17 Yet Lamarck seems to have been generally stalwart in maintaining his own opinions, even when they met with opposition, contrary evidence, ridicule, or neglect. In regard to Lamarck's tenacity in maintaining a position irrespective of its popularity (or for that matter, its wisdom), a familiar anecdote bears retelling. The story concerns the role Lamarck played in his first military engagement: the battle of Fillinckhausen of July 14, 1761. Just how true the story may be scarcely matters. The story was related to Georges Cuvier by Lamarck's son, Auguste, following his father's death, and since Auguste de Lamarck's account presumably approximates the story Lamarck told to his children, it evidently reveals what kind of person Lamarck considered himself to be. Lamarck's first battle proved to be a losing cause. Upon arriving at the front, he was placed with a company of grenadiers that came under heavy fire and soon lost all of its commanding officers. As the rest of the French army retreated, Lamarck and his comrades were overlooked and consequently received no instructions to withdraw. When the worried grenadiers turned to the young Lamarck for advice, he reportedly told them: "We have been placed here, we must not leave our post without having been relieved. If you fear being captured, leave. As for me, I will stay." The company stayed and

10

The Spirit of System

was finally relieved later in the day. 18 This story has been recounted frequently by Lamarck's biographers as an indication of his bravery and loyalty as a young man. An analogy between Lamarck's military and scientific behavior seems obvious: Lamarck was courageous in the face of strong opposition. In fact, however, an analogy of a much tighter sort can be drawn. It will be argued in the following pages that it was in no small measure Lamarck's refusal to give u p certain scientific and philosophical positions—positions that in the late 1790s were under fire and of questionable defensibility—that led him to his belief in evolution in the first place. One's sympathies inevitably go out to the aged Lamarck: blind, poor, and unappreciated by his contemporaries. This lonely figure stands in stark contrast to his major critic, Cuvier, whose talents, both scientific and political, earned for him a position of great prestige and power in French science in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Yet if Lamarck appears as a sympathetic figure, especially when compared to Cuvier, Lamarck's personality does not seem to have been one which would have readily endeared him to others. Lamarck appears to have been reserved, prone to a certain bitterness and self-righteousness, and not especially receptive to the ideas of others though very desirous of being taken seriously himself. Lamarck was a sensitive person, susceptible of being wounded deeply by personal affronts. When traveling through Europe with Buffon's son in his charge, the spoiled young Buffon grew to hate being under Lamarck's surveillance and poured ink all over Lamarck's linens and best clothing. I n the last years of Lamarck's life it still grieved him to recall the incident. 19 In 1802, while reading a memoir on meteorology to the first class of the institute, Lamarck was interrupted by scathing criticism from Laplace. 20 Perhaps for this reason Lamarck never read a memoir to the institute again. More painful still, undoubtedly, was the rebuff Lamarck received from Napoleon when he sought to present his Philosophie zoologique to the Emperor. Napoleon rudely dismissed Lamarck, mistaking the new book for one of Lamarck's meteorological annuals, which Napoleon considered unworthy of a member of his Académie des Sciences. T h e elderly zoologist was reduced to tears. 21 T h o u g h it is unfortunate that so little is known of Lamarck's personal life, it does seem that his scientific work was the focus of his existence. He found an escape from his personal misfortunes in the solitude of his studies. As he reflected on the broad panorama

Introduction

11

of nature's operations, the anguishes of his life were soothed. The neglect of his views, the painful personal affronts, the physical infirmities that weighed increasingly upon him, and the financial and emotional problems posed by his large family all shrank in importance as he contemplated the laws of the cosmos. Much more can be said about Lamarck's scientific ideas than about his personal life. Nonetheless, in the intellectual realm as well as in the personal, too little is known about Lamarck. He rarely stopped to review the ways his thoughts had developed on any subject. When he did so, he overrationalized the progress of his thinking. And more often than not he failed to identify the individuals from whom he borrowed ideas. Two contrary tendencies have emerged in historical treatments of Lamarck's views as the result of Lamarck's inattention to the sources of his views. One has been to presume that Lamarck was extraordinarily independent in his thinking. The other has been to propose a whole host of thinkers as his precursors on the basis of a greater or lesser resemblance of his views to theirs. There is no question that certain of Lamarck's views were less novel than has frequently been supposed. An individual's thinking is not explained, however, simply by identifying contemporary or earlier thinkers who held the same or similar views. Too great a concern with Lamarck's precursors (and his successors as well) has led to a failure to analyze his own intellectual development and the dynamics of the scientific community of which he was a part. Obviously, however, the quality and originality of Lamarck's thought cannot be judged solely by studying that thought alone. Comparing his thought with that of his immediate predecessors and close colleagues is essential in identifying the ideas (and combinations of ideas) that were considered viable in his time. Reconstructing the intellectual milieu in which Lamarck operated as a means of evaluating the guiding features of Lamarck's evolutionary thought is one of the major tasks of this book. Instead of placing Lamarck on a continuum between Buffon and Charles Darwin, or worrying about what, if anything, Lamarck owed to Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, Lamarck's work will be studied here by comparing it above all to the works of his colleagues.22 Lamarck quite evidently owed a good deal to certain of his predecessors. The ideas of Buffon, Linnaeus, and Von Haller, for example, reappear with considerable frequency in Lamarck's writing. Yet the dynamics of Lamarck's thought are perhaps best

12

The Spirit of System

appreciated by comparing his thinking not so much to those who came before him as to those of his time. In this regard his views must be compared not only with those of such well-known contemporaries as Daubenton and Cuvier but also those of such lesser lights as Bosc, Bruguière, Duchesne, Faujas de Saint-Fond, Lacépède, Olivier, and Reynier. T h e idea of organic evolution may be viewed as a natural outgrowth of certain trends in eighteenth-century thought, such as an increasing materialism or the development of historical thinking. But this leaves one with little notion of why Lamarck came to develop his theory of evolution at the time that he did or why his contemporaries were by and large unsympathetic to his views. If Lamarck's place in the history of biology is to be understood, the common assumptions of the naturalists of Lamarck's day and the theoretical and methodological issues that divided these thinkers must be known. What counted most for Lamarck himself must also be identified. A n individual with considerable pride, Lamarck sought to define for himself a special scientific role—that of naturalist-philosopher—at a time when his contemporaries were inclined to be skeptical both of the utility of such a role and Lamarck's own ability to fill it. H e was not merely a precursor of Darwin or the culminator of various trends in eighteenth-century thought. Seeking to understand the essence of life and its various manifestations, responding not only to general developments in the sciences but also to the specific demands of his own work as a naturalist, Lamarck reveals himself as very much a man of his time.

CHAPTER

ONE

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

In the first years of the nineteenth century, as he neared his sixtieth birthday, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck felt himself to be at the peak of his intellectual productivity. A distinguished career in botany lay behind him. A new career in invertebrate zoology was bearing further testimony to his talents as a systematist. And the project he saw as his crowning glory was taking shape in his mind: he intended to set out for his contemporaries an entire "terrestrial physics," encompassing "considerations of the first order" relative to the fluctuations of the earth's atmosphere (meteorology), the changes of the earth's surface (hydrogeology), and the origin and nature of living things (biology).1 He was, however, experiencing a difficulty. His contemporaries were proving unreceptive to his new ideas. In 1797 Lamarck had told his colleagues in the first class of the Institut de France that the earth's atmosphere exhibited regular fluctuations corresponding to the moon's elevation above or declination below the earth's equator. 2 Two years later he had told this same group that the present features of the earth's surface were the result of everyday kinds of processes that had operated over long periods of time.3 In 1800 he had told his students at the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle that the phenomena of life could be explained in a wholly naturalistic fashion: the origin of living things, their diversity, and the special faculties they displayed were no longer mysterious once nature's true way of proceeding was recognized.4

14

The Spirit of System

T o Lamarck's dismay at the beginning of the new century, these and other of his major ideas were being ignored. Moreover, his contemporaries were conveying to him the impression that not only did they consider certain ideas of his to be wrong, they regarded his basic approach to science to be retrogressive. T o Lamarck, who prided himself on the special intellectual role he felt he was playing, this last judgment was the unkindest of all. As he reflected on the dominant mood of the scientific community his feelings became anguished and bitter. While attending the meetings of the leading scientific societies, he imagined that winks and smiles were being exchanged behind his back by conspirators who had combined to repress his novel views. Lamarck had not always felt so estranged from the rest of the French community. In earlier years French science had had its interest groups, centers of power, and intrigues. In the 1770s and 1780s, however, Lamarck was a man on the way up. Others perceived him as representing a modern trend in contemporary botany and they supported him. During the most difficult years of the French Revolution he was an active figure in French scientific circles, and he emerged from that troubled period with a wellestablished position in the official scientific structure. In the mid1790s, however, the events which fed his paranoia of the turn of the century began unfolding. In order to appreciate the successes and failures of Lamarck's career, it is necessary to understand the enterprise of natural history in his day, the conceptual and methodological concerns of his contemporaries, the institutional frameworks within which he operated, and the kind of thinker he perceived himself to be. IN FRANCE in the second half of the eighteenth century there was an immense popular enthusiasm for natural history and at the same time an increasing concern on the part of serious naturalists regarding their methods, goals, and the precise boundaries of their field. Just how fashionable natural history was in France in the period in question is suggested by a variety of indices. Buffon's Histoire naturelle and Pluche's Spectacle de la nature graced the shelves of private libraries even more frequently than did Voltaire's La Henriade or Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse.6 When the first three volumes of the Histoire naturelle appeared in 1749, the edition, though a relatively large one, sold out in six weeks.® By mid-century

Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

15

the height of fashion in French society was no longer the collection of antiquities but rather the possession of such apparatus as electrostatic generators and Leyden jars (for demonstrating the wonders of the new experimental physics) and natural history cabinets (for displaying the diversity, beauty, and curiosity found in nature's three kingdoms).7 Natural history cabinets became the prized possessions not only of naturalists, physicians, and apothecaries but also of businessmen, military officers, lawyers, ecclesiastics, ministers of state, and members of the royalty.8 Merchants did a lucrative business supplying collectors with specimens for their cabinets, so much so that at the end of the century some six hundred merchants were making a living in Paris selling shells to their clientele.9 Courses in natural history offered at the Jardin du Roi and privately by Valmont de Bomare were well attended. 10 "Herborizations"—brief excursions into the countryside to study plants in their natural habitats—also became popular. 11 Promoted in no small measure by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Lettres sur la botanique, herborizations provided the body with exercise and the soul with a chance to commune with nature. 12 Numerous expeditions were undertaken by naturalist-voyagers to unexplored parts of the world. In contrast to herborizations, these expeditions were genuinely perilous, so much so that one naturalist at the end of the century suggested drawing up a "martyrology of savants" and maintained that naturalist-voyagers would play the dominant role in it. That individual naturalists undertook the hazardous adventures they did indicates the appeal of natural history in this period. 13 A comparable indicator is the fact that in 1794, when the armies of France passed beyond their country's borders, the National Convention sent two professors from the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle with them. As members of a "Commission on the Sciences and the Arts," the function of these professors was to requisition objects of science and the arts for "the French people." Prominent among the objects they appropriated and shipped back to France were natural history specimens.14 In the 1750s, L.-J.-M. Daubenton, then Buffon's major collaborator on the Histoire naturelle, observed: "In the present century the science of natural history is more cultivated than it ever has been; not only do the majority of men of letters make it an object of study or relaxation, but there is in addition a greater taste for this science spread throughout the public, and each day it becomes stronger and more general." 15 Daubenton wondered whether natural

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Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

17

history would in time lose its popularity to another science or another activity. As it turned out, without precluding interests in other things scientific—among which were such marvels as electricity, "animal magnetism," and balloon ascents—the general enthusiasm for natural history remained high to the end of the century. T h e motivations behind the late-eighteenth-century interest in natural history were as diverse as the expressions of this interest. Beyond the promptings of fashion and the passions of the collector, one may readily identify religious, moral, psychological, philosophical, and utilitarian motives that contributed to the study of nature's productions. Often, more than one of these inspirations found expression in the writings of a single individual. Linnaeus, for example, at various times discussed or exemplified all of them. What seems especially prominent in Linnaeus' writings, as compared with the writings of the major French naturalists of the late eighteenth century, is the perception of classification as a respectful ordering of God's Creation. Combining piety and vanity, he confidently observed of himself: " G o d has permitted him to see more of his created work than any mortal before him. God has bestowed on him the greatest insight into nature study."1® Several French naturalists achieved equal heights of immodesty. By and large, though, they fell short of Linnaeus in piety. Réaumur was notable for the way his studies of nature inspired him to praise the Creator, but this kind of religious enthusiasm is lacking in the writings of Buffon, Daubenton, Adanson, Lamarck, and Cuvier. Linnaeus served as more than just an example of the religious incentives to study nature. H e was also proof that discoveries in natural history could make a person famous. But if some naturalists hoped to make themselves known to the world through their studies, others, like Rousseau, saw natural history primarily as a refuge from the world's cares.17 Still others, like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, saw natural history as a source for moral lessons through which individuals and society might be made better.18 Lamarck came to regard the most important aspect of natural history as that part which appealed to the investigator he called the naturaliste philosophe, or naturalist-philosopher. Pursuing knowledge basically for its own sake, he sought to understand the natural affinities among nature's productions and the general processes by which nature operated. He viewed this as the noblest activity the student of nature could define for himself. Daubenton, in contrast, was more skeptical of man's

Conchology came to the forefront of the enthusiasms of the collectornaturalist in the eighteenth century. Pictured here is the frontispiece of the third edition of Dezallier d'Argenville's Conchyliologie (1780).

Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

19

ability to perceive the "natural order" of things, and he treated natural history more as a source of potentially useful discoveries than as an end in itself. This utilitarian motive must not be underrated. Plants, in addition to their fundamental importance as a source of food and fibers, had long been valued for their specific medical uses. Indeed, on into the eighteenth century botany was perceived primarily in the role of handmaiden to medicine. Animals likewise had their obvious utility, and naturalist-voyagers typically justified their expeditions with the prospect of discovering new plants and animals of economic value or at least new sources of plants and animals of economic value. The Dutch monopoly of the lucrative spice trade was an instructive example to other countries. When, in the 1770s and 1780s, the French managed to import and cultivate spice trees in a few colonies of their own, they were naturally pleased with themselves and began envisioning greater things to come.19 During the French Revolution, when the status of the various French scientific institutions was placed in jeopardy, the naturalists at the Jardin du Roi were able to claim that their institution was of special value, and the popular acceptance of this claim undoubtedly contributed to the Jardin's preservation and reconstitution while other institutions were abolished. about the breadth of interests and motives involved in natural history in the late eighteenth century, it is worth looking more closely at how a professional defined his field. For this purpose, an excellent example is the naturalist and comparative anatomist L.-J.-M. Daubenton. Daubenton was keeper and demonstrator of the cabinet of natural history at the Jardin du Roi, collaborator with Buffon on the early volumes of the Histoire naturelle, occupant of the first chair of natural history in France (created for him at the Collège de France in 1778), holder of additional professorships at the veterinary school of Alfort, the École Normale, and the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, member of the Académie des Sciences and the Institut de France, and so forth. 20 His fame did not equal that of Linnaeus or Buffon, but to some of his fellow naturalists he appeared as an appropriate corrective to the excesses of the two giants of eighteenth-century natural history. Although more wary of speculation and more precise in his anatomical observations than Buffon, he refused to align himself with the Linnaean classifiers whose enterprise appeared to him dry and incomplete. THIS MUCH SAID

L.-J.-M. Daubenton (1716-1800), the Nestor of French natural history when the Jardin du Roi was transformed into the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle during the French Revolution.

Daubenton always took care to distinguish natural history from related fields. A full natural history, he acknowledged, would include the study of all physical things, including the air, meteorological phenomena, and heavenly bodies. These last subjects, however, were commonly understood to be separate from natural history, and so too, he felt, should be all those fields of science "which do not represent their objects in a state of nature." 2 1 Natural history, in other words, did not include chemistry, metallurgy, agriculture, technology, materia medica, anatomy, or medicine. As he explained, when the structure of a mineral or the organization of a plant or animal is altered through a technical process, the specimen in question ceases to be the concern of the naturalist. Daubenton proposed a division of scientific labor. It was the chemist's task to pulverize, dissolve, macerate, distill, and vitrify nature's productions. The metallurgist's role was to extract metals from mines. The

Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

21

agriculturalist helped nature produce plants by tilling and fertilizing the soil. T h e dyer and the pharmacist extended the properties of substances, making them more active. T h e anatomist unveiled the tiny, hidden structures of living things. T h e physician studied the mechanisms of the human body and learned to repair the body when it was out of order. T h e naturalist was left to contemplate "the minerals, plants, and animals in their different states, without mixing the processes of art with the operations of nature." 22 T h e naturalist's job, as Daubenton thus defined it, was restricted but still immense. Natural history, in his view, was by no means synonymous with the naming and classifying of species. Indeed, he expressed a wish to distinguish botany, as commonly practiced, from natural history, because contemporary botanists seemed to be primarily concerned with botanical nomenclature and classification and for Daubenton this was not the most important part of the study of plants.23 He supposed that the first object of the naturalist was to learn how to recognize nature's productions and distinguish them from one another, but he saw this as only the initial step in the naturalist's education. T h e complete naturalist was an individual who confronted nature's productions in all their aspects: " [ H e ] considers the brute and organized bodies in the different states through which they successively pass from their formation or birth to their destruction. He describes their structure and organization. H e tries to discover their origin and the causes of the changes which occur in the course of their existence."24 T h e major issues that confronted the naturalist of the late eighteenth century find expression in Daubenton's various discussions of natural history: the proper handling of description and nomenclature ("the greatest mistake [naturalists] have made is the multiplicity of names for the same thing"); 25 the utility of methods of classification and whether such methods represent divisions actually existing in nature ("all these methodical divisions into orders, classes, and genera depend on the whim of the naturalist who imagines them: they are not determined by the nature of things"); 26 the principal differences among the productions of nature (the most important being the distinction between "brute" [inorganic] bodies on the one hand and "organized" bodies on the other); the possibility of arranging nature's productions in a single chain of being (which Daubenton denied); the existence of gradations connecting the minerals, plants, and animals or the different classes within these divisions (which Daubenton also denied); the distinction be-

22

The Spirit of System

tween characteristics which identify species and those which only identify races or varieties; the importance of comparative anatomy in the study of organized beings; the circulation of substances in the overall economy of nature; the value of cabinets of natural history; the contributions of naturalist-voyagers; the dangers of unchecked speculation; the practical applications of natural history; and so on. T h e shifts in emphasis that distinguish Daubenton's later accounts of natural history from his earlier ones include a slight lessening of hostility toward methods of classification (despite a continued insistence that such methods were ultimately artificial), an increasing objection to the idea of a single chain of being linking nature's productions (an idea which was finding enthusiastic expression in the writings of the Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet), and a tendency to drop the idea that nature is divided into three kingdoms in favor of the idea that there are only two basic kinds of natural production: the brute and the organized. In 1755, in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, he drew no distinction between brute and organized bodies but simply stated that animals, plants, and minerals were the basic parts of natural history. 27 In 1782, in the Encyclopédie méthodique, he wrote of "the three kingdoms of nature," though he observed: "It is generally agreed that the principal difference between the productions of nature is that some are only brute while others have organs." 28 By 1795 he told his students at the École Normale that the word "kingdom" was altogether out of place in natural history: it was "improper". and "unintelligible." 2 9 T h i s observation was not made independently of the revolutionary sentiments of his audience. He had already drawn an enthusiastic response from his listeners by observing in an earlier lecture: " T h e lion is not the king of animals. There is no king in nature." 3 0 Whatever the immediate political context of these remarks, however, there is a broader conceptual significance to be found in his denial of the existence of three comparable kingdoms of nature. I n combining plants and animals in one category of organized beings, set off from the objects of the inorganic world, Daubenton, like many others of his time, was taking a critical step toward the notion of a science of biology. of the word "biology," or at least one of the coiners of that word, was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. 8 1 He introduced the word in 1802 to designate that part of his terrestrial physics which was to deal with "considerations of the first o r d e r . . . relative to the THE COINER

Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

23

origin and to the developments of organization of living bodies." 82 When he began writing his "Biologie" he subtitled it "considerations on the nature, the faculties, the developments, and the origin of living bodies."88 Stated as such, his subject did not represent a distinct break with the concerns that certain naturalists and anatomists had exhibited late in the eighteenth century, though the special views he had developed on the origin of living things did set him apart from the vast majority of his predecessors and contemporaries. All this, however, was several decades in the future at the time Lamarck took up the study of natural history. Lamarck became interested in botany as a young man stationed with the army in the south of France. Equipped with a botanical handbook, the Traite des plantes usuelles of Chomel, he herborized in the countryside around Toulon, where his company was garrisoned from 1764 to 1765. After his company was transferred to the Fort of Mont-Dauphin, he had the opportunity to contrast the Mediterranean flora of Toulon with the alpine flora of his new surroundings. An injury put an end to his military career in 1768. He subsequently worked as an accountant at a bank, contemplated the idea of becoming a musician, enrolled in medical school, and then, in the mid-1770s, attempted to make a full-time career for himself in the natural sciences. He became a member of the circle of botanists and students at the Jardin du Roi. It was there that he announced that he could provide a more efficient means of identifying French plants than any currently in use, and furthermore, that he could have his system ready in a year's time. Spurred on, it seems, by at least a verbal bet, he set to work on his "flora of France" and completed it within the designated time.34 The possibility of a significant future as a botanist materialized for Lamarck in 1777 when Buffon, impressed by the non-Linnaean aspects of Lamarck's work, arranged to have the work published at government expense with the proceeds from the sales going to the author. Lamarck's cause was also supported at this time by two influential individuals from his home province: le comte de la Billarderie and le comte d'Angiviller. Shortly thereafter Lamarck was chosen (again with Buffon's support) to fill a vacancy in the botanical section of the Académie des Sciences. Under the circumstances, the selection was extraordinary if not entirely unprecedented. The academy had ranked Lamarck as its second choice, behind the physician-botanist Jean Descemet, as the result of an election in which Descemet received twelve votes and Lamarck ten.

24

The Spirit of System

By the decision of the King, however, prompted by Buffon and d'Angiviller, the vacant position went to Lamarck. 35 Several observations must be made about the sequence of events that brought Lamarck in just a few years to a position of note in the French scientific community and to membership in the most prestigious institution of French science in the eighteenth century. The first is that his initial reputation came as the result of his invention of a novel approach to a difficulty that the botanists of his day had not resolved. Was it possible, he asked in his Flore françoise, that the same means could be used on the one hand to discover the names of the plants one wished to identify and on the other hand to represent the true affinities between the plants? He answered with a firm negative. The task of finding the name that botanists had given to a plant, he insisted, had to be divorced from the task of determining the place the plant occupied in the "natural order" of the plant kingdom.36 The first of these tasks was the one on which he concentrated his attentions in the Flore françoise. There he set forth a method of "analysis" that was unabashedly "artificial" and that had as its "unique object" the discovery of the names of observed plants. The effectiveness of this method, which involved a system of dichotomous keys, was a major reason for the Flore's success. The second observation to be made about Lamarck's rise to prominence regards how much he profited from being perceived as someone who represented a modern trend in natural history. Lamarck's attacks on the unnecessary complexity of Linnean systematics in general and the Linnean idea of the reality of genera in particular could only have delighted Buffon, who lacked the botanical knowledge to challenge Linnaeus in the great Swedish naturalist's own major field.37 It may also have been to Lamarck's advantage that he, unlike his rival Descemet, was not a physician. It was not that the naturalists of his day disapproved of training in medicine. Most botanists then possessed medical degrees. It was coming to be felt, however, that such sciences as botany, chemistry, and anatomy were worthy of study in their own right, not just as adjuncts to medicine. Descemet may have been seen as representing the older, more amateurish approach to botany. At any rate, his membership in the Faculté de Médecine, if not his approach to botany, appears to have earned him the hostility of Tessier and Desfontaines, scientifically oriented botanists belonging to the medical faculty's rival, the Société Royale de Médecine. Some of the

Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

25

votes cast for Lamarck are perhaps best interpreted as votes against Descemet. 38 It clearly must not be assumed that Lamarck, by being elected to the botany section of the academy, stood out as the new protégé of a happy, united family. Jealous of their specimens and their taxonomic systems, the botanists of late-eighteenth-century France did not work in a spirit of complete m u t u a l respect and cooperation. As one observer of the Paris scientific scene remarked in 1791, " T h e botanists and amateurs here are anything b u t communicative; when someone has a rare plant in flower, it is guarded more closely than a treasure." 3 9 Lamarck's major effort of the 1780s, his contribution to the botanical part of the Encyclopédie méthodique, was reportedly spoken of with universal scorn by the scientific botanists of France late in that decade. 40 Lamarck's most obvious talent as of the late 1770s was not his insight in approaching the more profound questions that the French naturalists of his time were confronting b u t instead his skill in identifying plants and in describing clearly and concisely the distinguishing characters of species a n d genera. His thoughts on plant anatomy a n d physiology were not novel. H e had not given the question of "natural method" the attention that Adanson or the Jussieus were giving it. His Flore françoise does begin with a long, theoretical discourse, b u t just how much of this discourse represents his own thinking is uncertain, for u n d e r Buffon's instructions, the preparation of the discourse was to be overseen by Daubenton, who proceeded to delegate some of this responsibility to l'abbé Haiiy. It was Haüy, Lamarck admitted, who was the source of some of the thoughts on n a t u r a l method that appeared there. 4 1 But if Lamarck had not fully probed the depths of n a t u r e study by the time the Flore françoise appeared, his concerns were certainly broader than that work revealed. H e first became known to the scientific establishment not as a botanist b u t as a meteorologist, when in 1776 a memoir of his " o n the principle phenomena of the atmosphere" was read to the academy. 42 H e wanted to e x p o u n d his thoughts on the n a t u r e and origin of minerals in the preliminary discourse of the Flore françoise b u t his mentors evidently prevented him from doing so. 43 I n 1780 he took on the formidable task of preparing the botanical section of the Encyclopédie méthodique, and until 1794, he published n o t h i n g b u t botanical studies. 44 T o the public he must have appeared as a very competent professional botanist, n o more a n d no less. Privately, his interests and goals were

26

The Spirit of System

more comprehensive. While his technical work as a botantist was consolidating his position among the naturalists of the French scientific community, his more reflective tendencies were leading him in directions not fully expressed in his writings until the 1790s and afterwards. A survey of the memoirs of the academy from the time of Lamarck's election in 1779 to the time of the body's abolishment in 1793 reveals just how much there was for a self-consciously independent and wide-ranging thinker like Lamarck to mull over during this period. 45 French science was enjoying a period of imsense vitality as Lamarck took his place at the academy among the likes of the chemists Lavoisier, Baumé, Berthollet, and Fourcroy; the astronomers Lalande and Lemonnier; the prominent students of mechanics Laplace and Coulomb; the experimental physicist Monge; the anatomists Daubenton, Portal, Vicq-d'Azyr, and Broussonet; the botanists Adanson, Jussieu, and Desfontaines; and the naturalists and mineralogists Desmarest, Sage, Haüy, and Tessier. (These scientists are identified by the sections of the academy they represented in 1785.) In botany, Lamarck's own field, the memoirs of the academy included not only accounts of useful species, previously unidentified species and genera, and how to make a herbarium, but also discussions of plant growth, the ability of wheat grains to maintain their generative properties despite long periods of dormancy or exposure to extremes of heat and cold, motion in plants and animals, the response of plants to light, and the problem of whether the reproductive organs of plants truly exhibit the phenomenon of irritability. T h e writers on the natural history of animals described several new species and discussed the properties of an electric fish, the regeneration of lost parts in fish, respiration in fish, and the location of the tracheal artery in birds. T h e majority of the contributions in mathematics and astronomy probably meant little to Lamarck, but he must have taken interest in developments in other fields, such as Coulomb's announcement of his fundamental law of electricity, Haüy's discussions of crystallography, the various observations made on extraordinary meteorological phenomena, the report prepared by the special committee of the Academy investigating the highly controversial subject of "animal magnetism," and the special prize that the academy offered on one aspect of the way substances were circulated through the three kingdoms of nature by means of the interrelated processes of fermentation, putrefaction, combustion, vegetation, and animalization. He was

Lamarck, Naturalist-Philosopher

27

clearly aware of the great excitement in the field of chemistry, where Lavoisier was leading the way to a new understanding of the phenomena of combustion, calcination, the compound nature of water, and so forth. Had Lamarck been interested only in living things, he would have had more than sufficient reason to take notice of the chemists' work, since their investigations included analyses of animal and vegetable substances and the study of chemical processes central to plant and animal physiology. As it was, the new developments in chemistry were of special interest to Lamarck because he had been elaborating a general chemical theory of his own. Lamarck's own contributions to the memoirs of the academy between 1779 and 1793 were limited to three botanical papers: the first on a new genus of plants, the second on the "classes" of the plant kingdom, and the third on the flowers of the nutmeg tree.46 He aspired, however, to broader accomplishments. For many fields of science, the barriers of specialization were just beginning to be raised. A single individual could still make a mark in several fields (a prime example of this was Lavoisier, who made major contributions to physiology and geology as well as to chemistry). In 1780, Lamarck presented a lengthy manuscript detailing his own "researches on the causes of the principal physical facts" to the secretary of the academy. T o Lamarck's considerable disappointment, the committee assigned to review his manuscript never rendered an official judgment on it. 47 At the academy, Lamarck was promoted from assistant to associate botanist in 1783, and from associate to full pensionnaire in 1790. In the 1780s and 1790s he also secured an affiliation with the outstanding institution of natural history of the time: the Jardin et Cabinet du Roi, headed by the illustrious Georges Louis Ledere, Comte de Buffon. Buffon, through his own renown and the general excellence of the professors and demonstrators at the Jardin du Roi, through his direction of the internal affairs at the Jardin du Roi for nearly half a century, and through his cultivation of good relations with the high functionaries of the state (and his consequent ability to make major demands on the state's coffers to support his building projects at the jardin), had assured the jardin of a position of eminence in the scientific enterprise of the late eighteenth century. 48 Having already extended his patronage to Lamarck for the publication of the Flore françoise and Lamarck's election to the academy,

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