Our man Augustin Augier, coming along a half century later with his botanical tree of classification, seems to have seen himself challenging Linnaeus’s overly neat sexual system. “Stamen number is a striking character,” Augier conceded, but “not when it comes to the examination of plants”—that is, not always unambiguous and therefore not reliable as a basis for organizing the great jumble of botanical life. He nodded respectfully to Linnaeus—also to the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, who had sorted plants into roughly seven hundred genera based on their flowers, their fruits, and other bits of their anatomy—and offered his own system, using multiple characters for different levels of sorting and to resolve the ambiguities and fine gradations. “This figure, which I call a botanical tree, shows the agreements which the different series of plants maintain amongst each other, although detaching themselves from the trunk; just as a genealogical tree shows the order in which different branches of the same family came from the stem to which they owe their origin.” All discrete, yet all connected: bits of the same tree.
But they weren’t connected, in Augier’s mind, by descent from shared ancestors. Despite the hint he gave to himself in his language about family trees—all branches divergent from “the stem to which they owe their origin”—there is no evidence in Augier’s writing or his tree figure that he had embraced, or even imagined, the idea of evolution.
That idea was coming soon, and, with its arrival, the tree of life would change meaning. The change was drastic, soul shaking to many people who lived through it, because it reflected a challenge to faith, and it met strong resistance. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, France’s great early evolutionist, and Edward Hitchcock, an American who prided himself a “Christian geologist,” are the two scientists whose works—and whose graphic illustrations—best reflect how tree thinking shifted during the decades before Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution.
Lamarck was a protean figure: a soldier from a family of soldiering minor nobility who transformed himself into a botanist, then into a professor of zoology at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, to which he was appointed in 1793, on the eve of the Reign of Terror. His title at the museum put him in charge “of insects, of worms, and microscopic animals,” three categories of life he had never studied, but he adapted fast, and even invented the word invertebrates to cover them. He abandoned plants and studied his invertebrates through the grimmest days of the French Revolution, earning a measly salary but at least keeping his head, as other scientists such as Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier went to the guillotine. Lamarck had probably helped his standing among the revolutionaries back in 1790 while employed at what was then the Jardin du Roi, when he urged dropping the royal label and renaming that institution the Jardin des Plantes. Clearly, he had good political instincts. He held the conventional view of species—that they were fixed forever and created by God—until 1797, but then his views changed, possibly as a result of his study of fossil and living mollusks, which seemed to show patterns of gradual transformation. He came out as an evolutionist on May 11, 1800, in his first lecture for the year’s course on invertebrates. After that, he published three major works on evolutionary zoology, the most influential being his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809.
Lamarck outlived four wives and three of his seven children, living beyond the revolution, through the Napoleonic era and most of the Bourbon Restoration, a handsome man with a downturned mouth, balding slowly across his pate, blind for his final ten years, his faithful daughter, Cornelie, giving her life to him and reading him French novels. He died at eighty-five and was eulogized by important colleagues such as Geoffroy St. Hilaire, after which things didn’t go so well: his remains were interred at the Montparnasse Cemetery in a common trench, not a permanent individual plot, and because such burial trenches were regularly recycled, his bones may have ended up in the Paris catacombs, along with those of thousands of paupers and other neglected folk. There was no Lamarck grave to visit. He became, according to one biographer, rather quickly “forgotten and unknown.” His fame would return, if not immediately, but still it was a cold finish for the world’s first serious evolutionary theorist.
Lamarck nowadays is commonly associated with what his name came to represent: Lamarckism, an easy but imprecise label for the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Many people are vaguely aware of him as a predecessor to Darwin; he is seen as a forerunner whose theory was provocative but wrong, refuted by later evidence because it depended, as Darwin’s did not, on that illusory notion of acquired traits being heritable. (The real facts aren’t so simple. For instance, Darwin himself included the inheritance of acquired characteristics as a force in evolution, under the label “use and disuse.”) The most familiar example of such inherited adjustments, which Lamarck himself offered, is the giraffe. The proto-giraffe on the dry plains of Africa stretches to reach high foliage, its neck lengthens (supposedly) from the effort, its front legs lengthen too, and therefore (again supposedly) its offspring are born with longer necks and front legs. Lamarckism, in that cartoonish form, has been easy to despise but harder to kill off entirely.
It came back into fashion during the late nineteenth century, when the general idea of evolution gained acceptance but the crucial details of Darwin’s particular theory, offering natural selection as the primary mechanism, were widely rejected. Natural selection just seemed too mechanistic, too stark and unguided, and many evolutionists found it unpalatable. This situation went on for decades—the world accepting Darwin’s idea of evolution but not his explanation of how it occurs—though only historians remember that now. Lamarckism became neo-Lamarckism and seemed a less nihilistic alternative. It has continued to linger as a dubious but ineradicable notion—embodied in that single tenet, the inheritance of acquired characteristics—enjoying small surges of reconsideration even down to the present day.
But that single tenet was never Lamarck in totality. He had other ideas, some even worse. He believed in spontaneous generation. He disbelieved in extinction, at least as a natural process. He argued that “subtle fluids,” surging through the bodies of living creatures, helped reshape them adaptively.
In one of his earlier botanical works, before the shift to animals and the epiphany about evolution, Lamarck had arranged plants in what he called “the true order of gradation”: from least perfect and complete to most, ascending along an old-fashioned ladder of life. He matched that with a separate ladder for animals, a “counterpart” arrangement, showing an ascending series of forms: from worms, through insects, through fish and amphibians and birds, to mammals. Neither of those ladders hinted at divergence from common ancestors or transformation. But in the 1809 book Philosophie Zoologique, he included a different sort of figure, subtle yet dramatic, depicting animal diversity. It was a branched diagram, descending down the page, with major animal groups connected by dotted lines, like one of those connect-the-dots games for kids on the paper placemats at a pancake house. Connect the dots and discover that the secret shape is … an airplane! Or … an elephant! Or … George Washington’s head! In Lamarck’s dotted figure, the secret shape was a tree.
Lamarck’s tree of dots, 1809.
Birds sat perched on a branch divergent from reptiles.