LAMARCK'S WORK IN METEOROLOGY AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE
When a medical student in Paris, Lamarck, from day to day watching the
clouds from his attic windows, became much interested in meteorology,
and, indeed, at first this subject had nearly as much attraction for him
as botany. For a long period he pursued these studies, and he was the
first one to foretell the probabilities of the weather, thus
anticipating by over half a century the modern idea of making the
science of meteorology of practical use to mankind.
His article, "De l'influence de la lune sur l'atmosphère terrestre,"
appeared in the _Journal de Physique_ for 1798, and was translated in
two English journals. The titles of several other essays will be found
in the Bibliography at the close of this volume.
From 1799 to 1810 he regularly published an annual meteorological report
containing the statement of probabilities acquired by a long series of
observations on the state of the weather and the variations of the
atmosphere at different times of the year, giving indications of the
periods when to expect pleasant weather, or rain, storms, tempests,
frosts, thaws, etc.; finally the citations of these probabilities of
times favorable to fêtes, journeys, voyages, harvesting crops, and
other enterprises dependent on good weather.
Lamarck thus explained the principles on which he based his
probabilities: Two kinds of causes, he says, displace the fluids which
compose the atmosphere, some being variable and irregular, others
constant, whose action is subject to progressive and fixed laws.
Between the tropics constant causes exercise an action so considerable
that the irregular effects of variable causes are there in some degree
lost; hence result the prevailing winds which in these climates become
established and change at determinate epochs.
Beyond the tropics, and especially toward the middle of the temperate
zones, variable causes predominate. We can, however, still discover
there the effects of the action of constant causes, though much
weakened; we can assign them the principal epochs, and in a great number
of cases make this knowledge turn to our profit. It is in the elevation
and depression (_abaissement_) of the moon above and below the celestial
equator that we should seek for the most constant of these causes.
With his usual facility in such matters, he was not long in advancing a
theory, according to which the atmosphere is regarded as resembling the
sea, having a surface, waves, and storms; it ought likewise to have a
flux and reflux, for the moon ought to exercise the same influence upon
it that it does on the ocean. In the temperate and frigid zones,
therefore, the wind, which is only the tide of the atmosphere, must
depend greatly on the declination of the moon; it ought to blow toward
the pole that is nearest to it, and advancing in that direction only, in
order to reach every place, traversing dry countries or extensive seas,
it ought then to render the sky serene or stormy. If the influence of
the moon on the weather is denied, it is only that it may be referred to
its phases, but its position in the ecliptic is regarded as affording
probabilities much nearer the truth.[58]
In each of these annuals Lamarck took great care to avoid making any
positive predictions. "No one," he says, "could make these predictions
without deceiving himself and abusing the confidence of persons who
might place reliance on them." He only intended to propose simple
probabilities.
After the publication of the first of these annuals, at the request of
Lamarck, who had made it the subject of a memoir read to the Institute
in 1800 (9 ventôse, l'an IX.), Chaptal, Minister of the Interior,
thought it well to establish in France a regular correspondence of
meteorological observations made daily at different points remote from
each other, and he conferred the direction of it on Lamarck. This system
of meteorological reports lasted but a short time, and was not
maintained by Chaptal's successor. After three of these annual reports
had appeared, Lamarck rather suddenly stopped publishing them, and an
incident occurred in connection with their cessation which led to the
story that he had suffered ill treatment and neglect from Napoleon I.
It has been supposed that Lamarck, who was frank and at times brusque in
character, had made some enemies, and that he had been represented to
the Emperor as a maker of almanacs and of weather predictions, and that
Napoleon, during a reception, showing to Lamarck his great
dissatisfaction with the annuals, had ordered him to stop their
publication.
But according to Bourguin's statement this is not the correct version.
He tells us:
"According to traditions preserved in the family of Lamarck things
did not happen so at all. During a reception given to the Institute
at the Tuileries, Napoleon, who really liked Lamarck, spoke to him
in a jocular way about his weather probabilities, and Lamarck, very
much provoked (_très contrarié_) at being thus chaffed in the
presence of his colleagues, resolved to stop the publication of his
observations on the weather. What proves that this version is the
true one is that Lamarck published another annual which he had in
preparation for the year 1810. In the preface he announced that his
age, ill health, and his circumstances placed him in the unfortunate
necessity of ceasing to busy himself with this periodical work. He
ended by inviting those who had the taste for meteorological
observations, and the means of devoting their time to it, to take up
with confidence an enterprise good in itself, based on a genuine
foundation, and from which the public would derive advantageous
results."
These opuscles, such as they were, in which Lamarck treated different
subjects bearing on the winds, great droughts, rainy seasons, tides,
etc., became the precursors of the _Annuaires du Bureau des
Longitudes_.
An observation of Lamarck's on a rare and curious form of cloud has
quite recently been referred to by a French meteorologist. It is
probable, says M. E. Durand-Greville in _La Nature_, November 24, 1900,
that Lamarck was the first to observe the so-called pocky or festoon
cloud, or mammato-cirrus cloud, which at rare intervals has been
observed since his time.[59]
Full of over confidence in the correctness of his views formed without
reference to experiments, although Lavoisier, by his discovery of oxygen
in the years 1772-85, and other researches, had laid the foundations of
the antiphlogistic or modern chemistry, Lamarck quixotically attempted
to substitute his own speculative views for those of the discoverers of
oxygen--Priestley (1774) and the great French chemist Lavoisier.
Lamarck, in his _Hydrogéologie_ (1802), went so far as to declare:
"It is not true, and it seems to me even absurd to believe that pure
air, which has been justly called _vital air_, and which chemists
now call _oxygen gas_, can be the radical of saline matters--namely,
can be the principle of acidity, of causticity, or any salinity
whatever. There are a thousand ways of refuting this error without
the possibility of a reply.... This hypothesis, the best of all
those which had been imagined when Lavoisier conceived it, cannot
now be longer held, since I have discovered what is really
_caloric_" (p. 161).
After paying his respects to Priestley, he asks: "What, then, can be the
reason why the views of chemists and mine are so opposed?" and complains
that the former have avoided all written discussion on this subject. And
this after his three physico-chemical works, the _Réfutation_, the
_Recherches_, and the _Mémoires_ had appeared, and seemed to chemists to
be unworthy of a reply.
It must be admitted that Lamarck was on this occasion unduly
self-opinionated and stubborn in adhering to such views at a time when
the physical sciences were being placed on a firm and lasting basis by
experimental philosophers. The two great lessons of science--to suspend
one's judgment and to wait for more light in theoretical matters on
which scientific men were so divided--and the necessity of adhering to
his own line of biological study, where he had facts of his own
observing on which to rest his opinions, Lamarck did not seem ever to
have learned.
The excuse for his rash and quixotic course in respect to his
physico-chemical vagaries is that he had great mental activity. Lamarck
was a synthetic philosopher. He had been brought up in the encyclopædic
period of learning. He had from his early manhood been deeply interested
in physical subjects. In middle age he probably lived a very retired
life, did not mingle with his compeers or discuss his views with them.
So that when he came to publish them, he found not a single supporter.
His speculations were received in silence and not deemed worthy of
discussion.
A very just and discriminating judge of Lamarck's work, Professor
Cleland, thus refers to his writings on physics and chemistry:
"The most prominent defect in Lamarck must be admitted, quite apart
from all consideration of the famous hypothesis which bears his
name, to have been want of control in speculation. Doubtless the
speculative tendency furnished a powerful incentive to work, but it
outran the legitimate deductions from observation, and led him into
the production of volumes of worthless chemistry without
experimental basis, as well as into spending much time in fruitless
meteorological predictions." (_Encyc. Brit._, Art. LAMARCK.)
How a modern physicist regards Lamarck's views on physics may be seen by
the following statement kindly written for this book by Professor Carl
Barus of Brown University, Providence:
"Lamarck's physical and chemical speculations, made throughout on
the basis of the alchemistic philosophy of the time, will have
little further interest to-day than as evidence showing the broadly
philosophic tendencies of Lamarck's mind. Made without experiment
and without mathematics, the contents of the three volumes will
hardly repay perusal, except by the historian interested in certain
aspects of pre-Lavoisierian science. The temerity with which
physical phenomena are referred to occult static molecules,
permeated by subtle fluids, the whole mechanism left without dynamic
quality, since the mass of the molecule is to be non-essential, is
markedly in contrast with the discredit into which such hypotheses
have now fallen. It is true that an explanation of natural phenomena
in terms "le feu éthéré, le feu calorique, et le feu fixé" might be
interpreted with reference to the modern doctrine of energy; but it
is certain that Lamarck, antedating Fresnel, Carnot, Ampère, not to
mention their great followers, had not the faintest inkling of the
possibility of such an interpretation. Indeed, one may readily
account for the resemblance to modern views, seeing that all
speculative systems of science must to some extent run in parallel,
inasmuch as they begin with the facts of common experience. Nor were
his speculations in any degree stimulating to theoretical science.
Many of his mechanisms in which the ether operates on a plane of
equality with the air can only be regarded with amusement. The whole
of his elaborate schemes of color classification may be instanced as
forerunners of the methods commercially in vogue to-day; they are
not the harbingers of methods scientifically in vogue. One looks in
vain for research adequate to carry the load of so much speculative
text.
"Even if we realize that the beginnings of science could but be made
amid such groping in the dark, it is a pity that a man of Lamarck's
genius, which seems to have been destitute of the instincts of an
experimentalist, should have lavished so much serious thought in
evolving a system of chemical physics out of himself."
The chemical status of Lamarck's writings is thus stated by Professor H.
Carrington Bolton in a letter dated Washington, D. C., February 9, 1900:
"Excuse delay in replying to your inquiry as to the chemical status
of the French naturalist, Lamarck. Not until this morning have I
found it convenient to go to the Library of Congress. That Library
has not the _Recherches_ nor the _Mémoires_, but the position of
Lamarck is well known. He had no influence on chemistry, and his
name is not mentioned in the principal histories of chemistry. He
made no experiments, but depended upon his imagination for his
facts; he opposed the tenets of the new French school founded by
Lavoisier, and proposed a fanciful scheme of abstract principles
that remind one of alchemy.
"Cuvier, in his _Éloge_ (_Mémoires Acad. Royale des Sciences_,
1832), estimates Lamarck correctly as respects his position in
physical science."
Lamarck boldly carried the principle of change and evolution into
inorganic nature by the same law of change of circumstances producing
change of species.
Under the head, "De l'espèce parmi les minéraux," p. 149, the author
states that he had for a long time supposed that there were no species
among minerals. Here, also, he doubts, and boldly, if not rashly, in
this case, opposes accepted views, and in this field, as elsewhere,
shows, at least, his independence of thought.
"They teach in Paris," he says, "that the integrant molecule of each
kind of compound is invariable in nature, and consequently that it
is as old as nature, hence, mineral species are constant.
"For myself, I declare that I am persuaded, and even feel convinced,
that the integrant molecule of every compound substance whatever,
may change its nature, namely, may undergo changes in the number and
in the proportions of the principles which compose it."
He enlarges on this subject through eight pages. He was evidently led to
take this view from his assumption that everything, every natural
object, organic or inorganic, undergoes a change. But it may be
objected that this view will not apply to minerals, because those of the
archæan rocks do not differ, and have undergone no change since then to
the present time, unless we except such minerals as are alteration
products due to metamorphism. The primary laws of nature, of physics,
and of chemistry are unchangeable, while change, progression from the
generalized to the specialized, is distinctly characteristic of the
organic as opposed to the inorganic world.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] "On the Influence of the Moon on the Earth's Atmosphere," _Journal
de Physique_, prairial, l'an VI. (1798).
[59] Nature, Dec. 6, 1900.