Note 180 — Chapter XVII · THE “PHILOSOPHIE ZOOLOGIQUE”

Lamarck’s idea of the animal series was that of a branched one, as shown by his genealogical tree on p. 193, and he explains that the series begins at least by two special branches, these ending in branchlets. He thus breaks entirely away from the old idea of a continuous ascending series of his predecessors Bonnet and others. Professor R. Hertwig therefore makes a decided mistake and does Lamarck a great injustice in his “Zoölogy,” where he states: “Lamarck, in agreement with the then prevailing conceptions, regarded the animal kingdom as a series grading from the lowest primitive animal up to man” (p. 26); and again, on the next page, he speaks of “the theory of Geoffroy St.-Hilaire and Lamarck” as having in it “as a fundamental error the doctrine of the serial arrangement of the animal world” (English Trans.). Hertwig is in error, and could never have carefully read what Lamarck did say, or have known that he was the first to throw aside the serial arrangement, and to sketch out a genealogical tree.