on these valuable remains7, “as if the superstition of the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by Nature, in order to transmit to future times a monument of her history. By embalming with so much care the brutes which were the objects of their foolish adoration, that extraordinary and capricious people have left us, in their sacred grottoes, almost complete cabinets of zoology. The climate has conspired with the art of embalming to preserve bodies from corruption, and we can now satisfy ourselves, by our own eyes, what was the condition of many species three thousand years ago. It is difficult to restrain the transports of our imagination, when we behold thus preserved, with their minutest bones, the smallest portions of their skin, and in every respect most perfectly recognizable, many animals, which at Thebes or Memphis, two or three thousand years ago, had their own priests and altars.” In regard to these curious relicts, Lamarck was forced to admit that they were identical with their living descendants in the same country, and accounted for it by saying that this happened because the climate and other physical conditions of the latter had long continued unaltered. But he makes no attempt to account for the fact which is so fatal to his theory, that these remains entirely correspond to individuals of the same species in many different quarters of the globe, where the physical conditions are so dissimilar that they ought to have produced important changes8.
It will likewise be observed as an important defect in Lamarck’s argument, that he can cite no positive fact to exemplify the substitution of some entirely new sense, faculty, or organ, in the room of some other suppressed as useless. “All the instances adduced,” says Mr. Lyell, “go only to prove that the dimensions and strength of members, and the perfection of certain attributes may, in a long succession of generations, be lessened and enfeebled by disuse; or, on the contrary, be matured and augmented by active exertion, just as we know that the power of scent is feeble in the greyhound, while its swiftness of pace and its acuteness of sight are remarkable; that the harrier and staghound, on the contrary, are comparatively slow in their movements, but excel in their sense of smelling. We point out to the reader this important chasm in the chain of the evidence, because he might otherwise imagine that we had merely omitted the illustrations for the sake of brevity; but the plain truth is, that there were no examples to be found, and when Lamarck talks of ‘the efforts of internal sentiment,’ ‘the influence of subtile fluids,’ and the ‘acts of organization,’ as causes whereby animals and plants may acquire new organs, he gives us names for things, and with a disregard of the strict rules of induction, resorts to fictions, as ideal as the ‘plastic virtue,’ and other phantoms of the middle ages.
“It is evident, that if some well authenticated facts could have been adduced to establish one complete step in the process of transformation, such as the appearance in individuals descending from a common stock, of a sense or organ entirely new, and a complete disappearance of some other enjoyed by their progenitors, that time alone might then be supposed sufficient to bring about any amount of metamorphosis. The gratuitous assumption, therefore, of a point so vital to the theory of transmutation, was unpardonable on the part of its advocate9.”
The transmutability of species is a point which has been maintained by many naturalists besides Lamarck, and the reasons they have adduced in support of their opinions are so various, that the full consideration of them would be inconsistent with our present purpose. It may be assumed as capable of most satisfactory proof, that the mutations which species undergo in accommodating themselves to a change of external circumstances, have a definite limit, and are regulated by constant laws; and that the capability of so varying, forms part of the specific character. Indefinite divergence from the original type is guarded against, in the case of intermixture of distinct species, by the sterility of the mule offspring; circumstances which show that species were designed to retain the individuality of character with which they were endowed at the time of their creation, and that they have a real existence in nature10.
The intellectual faculties of animals, Lamarck regards as entirely the result of organization. Even in the case of the most perfect of them, the human species, there is no distinct recognition of a spiritual substance derived from heaven; and all intellectual phenomena whatever, are ascribed to some physical cause. Nature, he conceives, offers nothing cognizable by us but body; the movements, changes, and properties of bodies, form the only field open to our observation, and the only source of real knowledge and useful truths11. The place of the soul seems to be usurped by a certain interior sentiment, to which he continually refers, as exercising a most powerful influence over all the faculties, and giving rise to all the passions and affections12. Thus the noblest faculties of the mind, “the capability and godlike reason,” by which we are distinguished from other animals, ——and this spirit, This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul, This particle of energy divine, Which travels nature, flies from star to star, And visits gods, and emulates their powers; are made to emanate from a certain relation of parts and organs—a particular conformation of material substances, just as a desired result is obtained by arranging in a certain order the parts of a piece of mechanism.
“But who can believe that such a faculty, so divine, so godlike and spiritual, can be the mere result of organization? That any juxta-position of material molecules, of whatsoever nature, from whatever source derived, in whatever order and forms arranged, and wherever placed, could generate thought, and reflection, and reasoning powers, could acquire and store up ideas and notions, as well concerning metaphysical as physical essences, may as safely be pronounced impossible, as that matter and spirit should be homogeneous. Though the intellectual part acts by the brain and nerves, yet the brain and nerves, however ample, however developed, are not the intellect, nor an intellectual substance, but only its instrument, fitted for the passage of the prime messenger of the soul, its nervous fluid or power to every motive organ. It is a substance calculated to convey instantaneously that subtile agent, by which spirit can act upon body, wherever the soul bids it to go and enables it to act. When death separates the intellectual and the spiritual from the material part, the introduction of a fluid, homogeneous with the nervous, or related to it by a galvanic battery, can put the nerves in action, lift the eyelids, move the limbs; but though the action of the intellectual part may thus be imitated, in newly deceased persons, still there are no signs of returning intelligence, there is no life, no voluntary action, not a trace of the spiritual agent that has been summoned from its dwelling. Whence it follows, that though the organization is that by which the intellectual and governing power manifests its presence and habitation, still it is evidently something distinct from and independent of it13.”
With opinions having such a decided tendency to materialism, it is not surprising that Lamarck seldom makes allusion to a Deity, and when he does so, he nearly confines himself to the bare acknowledgment of his existence. In his earlier works, there is no mention made of a Supreme Being whatever; and even when his existence is admitted, He is divested of the attributes which belong to him. The glory of forming the works of creation, in which His beneficence and power are so signally manifested, is ascribed to nature, or a certain order of things. This power to which the Deity has delegated his prerogatives, and which he has appointed his vicegerent, Lamarck defines as “An order of things composed of objects independent of matter, which are determined by the observation of bodies, and the whole amount of which constitutes a power, unalterable in its essence, governed in all its acts, and constantly acting upon all the parts of the physical universe14.” This blind power, which acts necessarily, has not, indeed, called matter into existence, but it has formed all bodies of which matter is essentially the base; and as it exercises no power except on the latter, which it modifies and changes in every possible manner, producing all its various aggregates and combinations, we may be assured that it is it which has made all bodies such as we now behold them, and that it is Nature which confers on some their properties, and on others the faculties which they exercise15. All this power Lamarck distinctly admits has been delegated to Nature by the Deity, and among other errors which he conceives to have attached to the ideas which have been entertained regarding Nature, he refutes the notion that Nature is the Deity himself. “Strange occurrence! that the watch should have been confounded with its maker, the work with its author. Assuredly this idea is illogical and unfit to be maintained. The power which has created Nature, has, without doubt, no limits, cannot be restricted in
