Vulgar words in Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work (Page 1)
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,103 ~ ~ ~
Hence he believed that he could derive the dog, the jackal, the wolf, and the fox from a single one of these four species; yet he remarks, _per contra_, in 1753: "Although we cannot demonstrate that the production of a species by modification is a thing impossible to nature, the number of contrary probabilities is so enormous that, even philosophically, we can scarcely doubt it; for if any species has been produced by the modification of another, if the species of ass has been derived from that of the horse, this could have been done only successively and by gradual steps: there would have been between the horse and ass a great number of intermediate animals, the first of which would gradually differ from the nature of the horse, and the last would gradually approach that of the ass; and why do we not see to-day the representatives, the descendants of those intermediate species?
~ ~ ~ Sentence 2,106 ~ ~ ~
"If we once admit that the ass belongs to the horse family, and that it only differs from it because it has been modified (_dégénéré_), we may likewise say that the monkey is of the same family as man, that it is a modified man, that man and the monkey have had a common origin like the horse and ass, that each family has had but a single source, and even that all the animals have come from a single animal, which in the succession of ages has produced, while perfecting and modifying itself, all the races of other animals" (tome iv., p. 382).