Pietro Corsi; Jean Gayon; Gabriel Gohau; Stéphane Tirard: Lamarck, philosophe de la nature,Lamarck, philosophe de la nature by Pietro  Corsi; Jean  Gayon; Gabriel  Gohau; Stéphane Tirard; Armand  de RicqlèsReview by: rev. by Sara ScharfIsis, Vol. 98, No. 4 (December 2007), p. 846Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/529308 .

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846 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 98 : 4 (2007)

Pietro Corsi; Jean Gayon; Gabriel Gohau;Stephane Tirard. Lamarck, philosophe de lanature. Preface byArmand de Ricqles. (Sci-ence, Histoire et Socie´te.) xxi � 167 pp., index.Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006.€20 (paper).

This compilation begins with several questionsarising from the love/hate relationship thatFrench intellectuals have with Lamarck. For in-stance, why have the most extensive scholarlyworks on Lamarck been published outside ofFrance, by scholars who are not French them-selves? Why is this man, so renowned in his life-time for wide-ranging interests and contributionsto natural history, now remembered mainly as aprecursor of Darwin who got the mechanism ofevolution wrong? And if Lamarck is so famousand important, why are his works so infrequentlyread?

The four contributors aim to fill some of thesegaps in the scholarship on Lamarck. They lookat his growth as a scholar and his many interests,they read beyond his most cited works, and theyall note that Lamarck’s vision of nature changedsubstantially around the year 1800. Each authorfocuses on a different aspect of Lamarck’soeu-vre and how it weathered his embrace of trans-formatism.

Gabriel Gohau examines Lamarck’s syntheticpublications, with emphasis on his chemical the-ories. Before 1800, Lamarck held that inorganicmatter was created by the actions of livingthings. He also believed that plant and animalspecies did not change. After 1800, however, La-marck proclaimed that inorganic matter can pre-cede life. It is likely, Gohau argues, that La-marck’s new view of the relationship betweeninorganic matter and living things was a vitalfoundation for his post-1800 transformativeviews about species.

Pietro Corsi traces the connections betweenLamarck’s “biology” and his interest in the earthsciences. The pre-1800s Lamarck saw life as aforce counteracting “nature,” where nature waswhat breaks down matter into its simplest ele-ments. However, Corsi asserts, Lamarck’s min-eralogical and hydrogeological studies alteredhis opinions about the relationship between lifeand nature. By 1800 Lamarck reasoned thatforces generated by the movement of the earth,such as changes in the weather, could interactwith matter on the surface of the earth and turndegraded matter into something alive. He calledthe study of such processes “biologie.” Corsishows that Lamarck was not able to pursuebiol-

ogie himself because the techniques to investi-gate the problems he wished to probe did not yetexist, and Lamarck himself was growing old andincreasingly politically alienated.

Stephane Tirard discusses Lamarck’s viewson spontaneous generation, which he considersto be a “cornerstone” of Lamarck’s transforma-tist program. Prior to 1800, Lamarck denied thatspontaneous generation could occur. By 1801,however, he began to discuss life as a result ofthe order in which material substances are ar-ranged. Lamarck no longer saw “animality” asseparated from inorganic material by a “great hi-atus.” Instead, it could be manifested to variousdegrees. And by 1802 Lamarck explained thatliving things were always being spontaneouslygenerated and growing in complexity over time.He did not, however, ever develop a fully artic-ulated vision of where matter came from or howthe first life developed.

Jean Gayon’s article is perhaps the least sat-isfying of the lot. He traces the history of thephrase now most associated with Lamarck, “in-heritance of acquired characters,” to show howthe concept and the words in the phrase were notalways used together or with reference to La-marck’s ideas. Lamarck, it turns out, never usedthe words “heredity” (“heredite”), “inherited,”or “hereditary” (“hereditaire”) to refer to thetransmission of biological features over genera-tions. Instead, this usage became standard onlyin the 1830s and 1840s. “For Lamarck,” Gayonwrites, “reproduction could never be anythingbut an extension of development, not a phenom-enon that would give the key to the history oflife sui generis” (p. 132). Lamarck was more in-terested in the modification of species than inheredity as we now understand it.

This insight is buried in a long article thatcould have used the quest to understand the rootsof the phrase “inheritance of acquired charac-ters” as a way to guide the reader through a his-tory of early nineteenth-century thought aboutgeneration. Instead, the focus on linguistic mat-ters seems like an excuse to avoid delving intothis interesting material in any depth.

On the whole,Lamarck, philosophe de la na-ture is a worthwhile read for anyone interestedin contemporary French thought about Lamarck.

SARA SCHARF

James Rodger Fleming; Vladimir Jankovic;Deborah R. Coen (Editors). Intimate Univer-sality: Local and Global Themes in the Historyof Weather and Climate. xx � 264 pp., illus.,

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