odern; it has been
occasionally asserted from the times of Anaximander and Lucretius to
those of Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh.

II. A definite conception that animal and vegetable forms were so
extensively mutable that few (and, if so, perhaps but one) could claim
to be of an original stock; the direct effect of changed conditions
being assigned as the cause of modification, and the important
consequences of the struggle for existence being in many respects fully
recognized. The fact of design or purpose in connection with organism,
as causing habits and thus as underlying all variation, was also
indicated with some clearness, but was not thoroughly understood.

This phase must be identified with the name of Buffon, who, as I will
show reason for believing, would have carried his theory much further if
he had not felt that he had gone as far in the right direction as was
then desirable. Buffon put forward his opinions, with great reserve and
yet with hardly less frankness, in volume after volume from 1749 to
1788, the year of his death, but they do not appear to have taken root
at once in France. They took root in England, and were thence
transplanted back to France.

III. A development in England of the Buffonian system, marked by
glimpses of the unity between offspring and parents, and broad
suggestions to the effect that the former must be considered as capable
of remembering, under certain circumstances, what had happened to it,
and what it did, when it was part of the personality of those from whom
it had descended.

A definite belief, openly expressed, that not only are many species
mutable, but that all living forms, whether animal or vegetable, are
descended from a single, or at any rate from not many, original low
forms of life, and this as the direct consequence of the actions and
requirements of the living forms themselves, and as the indirect
consequence of changed conditions. A definite cause is thus supposed to
underlie variations, and the resulting adaptations become purposive; but
this was not said, nor, I am afraid, seen.

This is the original Darwinism of Dr. Erasmus Darwin. It was put forward
in his 'Zoonomia,' in 1794, and was adopted almost in its entirety by
Lamarck, who, when he had caught the leading idea (probably through a
French translation of the 'Loves of the Plants,' which appeared in
1800), began to expound it in 1801; in 1802, 1803, 1806, and 1809, he
developed it with greater fulne