It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evolution itself has
undergone as complete an evolution as has any animal species with
which it deals. We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early
Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, half-developed forms of
it begin to appear in the eighteenth century of our era and become
more and more developed in the nineteenth, till they approximate
completion in Darwin. In Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are
glimpses of the theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed that it
anticipates Darwin on many points; often full of crudities and
absurdities, yet Lamarck hits the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr.
W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in
London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of
Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called "Vestiges of
Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of
species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution
theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the
minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse
toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in
Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin.