Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work

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Longmans, Green, and Company, 1901 - 451 pages
 

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Page 99 - The ruins of an older world,' said Hutton, ' are visible in the present structure of our planet ; and the strata which now compose our continents have been once beneath the sea, and were formed out of the waste of pre-existing continents. The same forces are still destroying, by chemical decomposition or mechanical violence, even the hardest rocks, and transporting the materials to the sea, * Ed.
Page 415 - ... taken place. They can show that the degrees of difference, so produced, are often, as in dogs, greater than those on which distinctions of species are in other cases founded. They can show that...
Page 423 - There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, then ; but it is another question whether he has fulfilled all the conditions imposed by that method. Is it satisfactorily proved, in fact, that species may be originated by selection ? that there is such a thing as natural selection ? that none of the phenomena exhibited by species are inconsistent with the origin of species in this way ? If these questions can be answered in the affirmative, Mr.
Page 110 - time is nothing. It is never a difficulty, she always has it at her disposal; and it is for her the means by which she has accomplished the greatest as well as the least of her results. For all the evolution of the earth and of living beings, nature needs but three elements — space, time, and...
Page 352 - The hypothesis of Lamarck — that progressive changes in species • have been produced by the attempts of animals to increase the development of their own organs, and thus modify their structure and habits...
Page 423 - After much consideration, and with assuredly no bias against Mr. Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in Nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural. Groups having the morphological character of species, distinct and permanent races in fact, have been so produced over and over again...
Page 148 - ... disappear, till they are not to be seen at all in the recent strata, still less in the existing seas, in which, indeed, we never discover their corresponding species, and where several even of their genera are not to be found ; that, on the contrary, the shells of the recent strata resemble, as it respects the genus, those which still exist in the sea ; and that in the last formed and loosest of these strata the.re are some species which the eye of the most expert naturalist cannot distinguish...
Page 70 - Descent carried out strictly into all its consequences. By its purely mechanical method of viewing organic nature, and the strictly philosophical proofs brought forward in it, Lamarck's work is raised far above the prevailing dualistic views of his time ; and with the exception of Darwin's work, which appeared just half a century later, we know of none which we could in this respect place by the side of the
Page 415 - ... any existing species — animal or vegetable — when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes of structure fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue, until ultimately the new conditions become the natural ones.
Page 147 - Thus the great catastrophes which have produced revolutions in the basin of the sea, were preceded, accompanied, and followed by changes in the nature of the fluid and of the substances which it held in solution ; and when the surface of the seas came to be divided by islands and projecting ridges, different changes took place in every separate basin.

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