daughters do not appear to have been the kind of persons
who could make effective sisters or cousins or aunts. Men of science are
of like passions even with the other holy ones who have set themselves
up in all ages as the pastors and prophets of mankind. The saint has
commonly deemed it to be for the interests of saintliness that he should
strain a point or two in his own favour--and the more so according as
his reputation for an appearance of candour has been the better earned.
If, then, Lamarck's opponents could keep choruses, while Lamarck had
nothing to fall back upon but the merits of his case only, it is not
surprising that he should have found himself neglected by the
scientists of his own time. Moreover he was too old to have undertaken
such an unequal contest. If he had been twenty years younger when he
began it, he would probably have enjoyed his full measure of success
before he died.

Not that Lamarck can claim, as a thinker, to stand on the same level
with Dr. Darwin, and still less so with Buffon. He attempted to go too
fast and too far. Seeing that if we accept descent with modification,
the question arises whether what we call life and consciousness may not
themselves be evolved from some thing or things which looked at one time
so little living and conscious that we call them inanimate--and being
anxious to see his theory reach, and to follow it, as far back as
possible, he speculates about the origin of life; having formed a theory
thereon, he is more inclined to interpret the phenomena of lower animal
life so as to make them fit in with his theory, than as he would have
interpreted them if there had been no theory at stake.

Thus his denial that sensation, and much more, intelligence and
deliberate action, can exist without a brain and a nervous system, has
led him to deny sensation, consciousness, and intelligence to many
animals which act in such manner as would certainly have made him say
that they feel and know what they are about, if he had formed no theory
about brains and nervous systems.

Nothing can be more different than the manners in which Lamarck and Dr.
Darwin wrote on this head. Lamarck over and over again maintains that
where there is no nervous system there can be no sensation. Combating,
for example, the assertion of Cabanis, that to live is to feel, he says
that "the greater number of the polypi and all the infusoria, having no
nervous system, it must be said of them as also of w