“Ce qu’il y a d’etonnant, est que pour arriver a ces connoissances il semble avoir perverti l’ordre naturel, pui-qu’au lieu de s’attacher d’abord a rechercher l’origine de notre globe il a commence par travailler a s’instruire de la nature.  Mais a l’entendre, ce renversement de l’ordre a ete pour lui l’effet d’un genie favorable qui l’a conduit pas a pas et comme par la main aux decouvertes les plus sublimes.  C’est en decomposant la substance de ce globe par une anatomie exacte de toutes ses parties qu’il a premierement appris de quelles matieres il etait compose et quels arrangemens ces memes matieres observaient entre elles.  Ces lumieres jointes a l’esprit de comparaison toujours necessaire a quiconque entreprend de percer les voiles dont la nature aime a se cacher, ont servi de guide a notre philosophe pour parvenir a des connoissances plus interessantes.  Par la matiere et l’arrangement de ces compositions il pretend avoir reconnu quelle est la veritable origine de ce globe que nous habitons, comment et par qui il a ete forme.”—­Pp. xix. xx.

But De Maillet was before his age, and as could hardly fail to happen to one who speculated on a zoological and botanical question before Linnaeus, and on a physiological problem before Haller, he fell into great errors here and there; and hence, perhaps, the general neglect of his work.  Robinet’s speculations are rather behind, than in advance of, those of De Maillet; and though Linnaeus may have played with the hypothesis of transmutation, it obtained no serious support until Lamarck adopted it, and advocated it with great ability in his “Philosophie Zoologique.”

Impelled towards the hypothesis of the transmutation of species, partly by his general cosmological and geological views; partly by the conception of a graduated, though irregularly branching, scale of being, which had arisen out of his profound study of plants and of the lower forms of animal life, Lamarck, whose general line of thought often closely resembles that of De Maillet, made a great advance upon the crude and merely speculative manner in which that writer deals with the question of the origin of living beings, by endeavouring to find physical causes competent to effect that change of one species into another, which De Maillet had only supposed to occur.  And Lamarck conceived that he had found in Nature such causes, amply sufficient for the purpose in view.  It is a physiological fact, he says, that organs are increased in size by action, atrophied by inaction; it is another physiological fact that modifications produced are transmissible to offspring.  Change the actions of an animal, therefore, and you will change its structure, by increasing the development of the parts newly brought into use and by the diminution of those less used; but by altering the circumstances which surround it you will alter its actions, and hence, in the long run, change of circumstance must produce change of organization.  All the species