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PRELUDE

“I believe that I have sufficiently demonstrated,” the philosopher continued, “the probability, if not the truth of the theory that terrestrial animals originate from marine ones, and which also established the natural formation of the latter in the sea, by the seeds with which its waters are impregnated, whether such seeds are assumed to be eternal or whether they exist by creation.... It is thus easy to imagine the manner in which all sensitive or vegetative things could be generated in a globe, whether it is being repopulated, or whether it has never been populated previously.”

Marginal note to the manuscript of

Telliamed by Benoît de Maillet

(written 1692-1718)

* * * *

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character...by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. I wish someone would indicate one to me. But if I had called man an ape, or vice versa, I should have fallen under the ban of the ecclesiastics. It may be that as a naturalist I should have done so.

Carl von Linné (alias Carolus Linnaeus),

letter to J. G. Gmelin, 1747

* * * *

If these different organisms are compared with one another and with what is known concerning man; if they are contemplated, from the simplest animal organization to that of man, which is the most complex and the most perfect, the progression exhibited in the composition of the organization, as well as the successive acquisition of different special organs and, therefore, of as many new faculties are developed organs; then it becomes perceptible how needs, initially reduced to a minimum and increasing gradually in number thereafter, have produced a tendency to actions appropriate to satisfy them; how actions that become habitual and energetic occasion the development of the organs that perform them; how the force that excites organic movements can, in the most imperfect animals, be located outside them and yet stimulate them; how, eventually, this force is transferred into the animal; and finally, how it there becomes the source of sensibility, and eventually of acts of intelligence.

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck,

Philosophie zoologique, 1809