Evolution, old and new, or, The theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Charles Darwin / By Samuel Butler, author of "Erewhon," ... Op. 4.

  • Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution, old and new, or, The theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck as compared with that of Charles Darwin / By Samuel Butler, author of "Erewhon," ... Op. 4. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    The compromise which he thought fit to put before the public was that Each species has a type of which the principal features are engraved in indelible and eternally permanent characters, while all accessory touches vary. * It would be satisfactory to know where an accessory touch is supposed to begin and end. And again :— The essential characteristics of every animal have been conserved without alteration in their most im- portant parts. . . . The individuals of each genus still represent the same forms as they did in the earliest ages, especially in the case of the larger animals (so that the generic forms even of the larger animals prove not to be the same, but only ' especially' the same as in the earliest ages), t This transparently illogical position is maintained ostensibly from first to last, much in the same spirit as in the two foregoing passages, written at intervals of thirteen years. But they are to be read by the light of the earlier one—placed as a lantern to the wary upon the threshold of his work in 1753—to the effect that a single, well substantiated case of degeneration would make it conceivable that all living beings were descended from but one common ancestor. If after having led up to this by a remorse- less logic, a man is found five-and-twenty years later still substantiating cases of degeneration, as he has been substantiating them unceasingly in thirty quartos during the whole interval, there should be little * Tom. xiii. p. ix. 1765. f Sup. torn. v. p. 27, 1778.