once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their
shorter-necked companions, and on the first scarcity of food were
thereby enabled to outlive them." Mr. Wallace's account also of
Lamarck's general theory appears to us to be one-sided, inadequate, and
misleading. He states it thus: "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." This is a caricature of what Lamarck really
taught. Wants, needs (_besoins_), volitions, desires, are not mentioned
by Lamarck in his two fundamental laws (see p. 303), and when the word
_besoins_ is introduced it refers as much to the physiological needs as
to the emotions of the animal resulting from some new environment which
forces it to adopt new habits such as means of locomotion or of
acquiring food.

It will be evident to one who has read the original or the foregoing
translations of Lamarck's writings that he does not refer so much to
mental desires or volitions as to those physiological wants or needs
thrust upon the animal by change of circumstances or by competition; and
his _besoins_ may include lust, hunger, as well as the necessity of
making muscular exertions such as walking, running, leaping, climbing,
swimming, or flying.

As we understand Lamarck, when he speaks of the incipient giraffe or
long-necked bird as making efforts to reach up or outwards, the efforts
may have been as much physiological, reflex, or instinctive as mental. A
recent writer, Dr. R. T. Jackson, curiously and yet naturally enough
uses the same phraseology as Lamarck when he says that the long siphon
of the common clam (Mya) "was brought about by the effort to reach the
surface, induced by the habit of deep burial" in its hole.[194]

On the other hand, can we in the higher vertebrates entirely dissociate
the emotional and mental activities from their physiological or
instinctive acts? Mr. Darwin, in his _Expressions of the Emotions in Man
and Animals_, discusses in an interesting and detailed way the effects
of the feelings and passions on some of the higher animals.

It is curious, also, that Dr. Erasmus Darwin went at least as far as
Lamarck in claiming that the transformations of animals "are in part
produced by their own exertions in consequence of their desires and
aversions, of their pleasures and their pains, or of irritations