And Erasmus
Darwin was by no means its only apostle. It was in the air then. A
German biologist named Treviranus, whose book was published in 1802,
wrote, 'In every living being there exists a capacity for endless
diversity of form. Each possesses the power of adapting its organization
to the variations of the external world; and it is this power, called
into activity by cosmic changes, which has enabled the simple zoophytes
of the primitive world to climb to higher and higher stages of
organization, and has brought endless variety into nature.' There you
have your evolution of Man from the amoeba all complete whilst Nelson
was still alive on the seas. And in 1809, before the battle of Waterloo,
a French soldier named Lamarck, who had beaten his musket into a
microscope and turned zoologist, declared that species were an illusion
produced by the shortness of our individual lives, and that they were
constantly changing and melting into one another and into new forms as
surely as the hand of a clock is continually moving, though it moves so
slowly that it looks stationary to us.
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