Abstract
JEAN BAPTISTE PIERRE LAMARCK died one hundred years ago, on Dec. 18, in his eighty-sixth year—a master of zoology whose work and thoughts gave fresh impetus to the progress of biology in his day, and in ours still enliven the unsettled controversy concerning the heritability of ‘acquired’ characters. Lamarck was a systematist, and in these days when systematics is apt to be despised among the multiplying branches of zoology, it is well to be reminded that it was on his experience in the discrimination of species that his great achievements were based. The earliest of these bore upon the classification of animals. He investigated the rich fauna of fossil mollusca in the Tertiary beds of the Paris basin, discovered that different species were distinctive of different beds, and gave at once an auspicious start to the paheontology of invertebrates and a lusty push to the stratigraphical conception of geological formations which his contemporary Werner had inaugurated. For the first time, he proposed a reasonable division and grouping of the invertebrate animals, which, apart from the insects, Linnaus had bundled into a hotchpotch of ‘Vermes’. It was characteristic of Lamarck that his mind kept revolving the greater problems raised by his detailed work. Thus the satisfaction with which he at first regarded the linear arrangement of his classification of the animal world gave way to doubt, and ultimately was replaced by the modern conception of a branching genealogical tree—a change of view which says much for the openness of the naturalist's mind at an age at which professors are nowadays compelled to retire.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
News and Views. Nature 124, 922–926 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124922a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124922a0