Philosophie zoologique, ou exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire naturelle des animaux; a la diversité de leur organisation et des facultés qu'ils en obtiennent ; aux causes physiques qui maintiennent en eux la vie et donnent lieu aux mouvemens qu'ils exécutent ; enfin, à celles qui produisent, les unes le sentiment, et les autres l'intelligence de ceux qui en sont doués. Tome premier [- seconde].

Paris: Dentu [&] the author, 1809.

First edition, an extremely important association copy with extensive contemporary learned and critical annotations by a prestigious scientist and colleague of Lamarck. This was his most complete presentation of his theory of evolution, “a classic in the literature of evolutionary theory” (PMM). This copy was owned and annotated by the great French chemist Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816). The annotations are lengthy and well-informed, citing contemporary authors such as Cuvier, Cabanis, and Richerand, and demonstrate the great depth and breadth of the annotator’s learning. Importantly, Guyton de Morveau adheres to the theory of evolution, unlike many of Lamarck's contemporaries. Part I of the Philosophie zoologique presents in detail Lamarck’s theory of evolution as the result of two factors, the tendency of species toward increasing complexity and the influence of the environment, responsible for all variations from this norm. Although the concept of ranging all forms of life in a single series, from the simplest to the most complicated, dated back to antiquity, Lamarck’s innovation was to suggest “that this scale corresponds to an order of historical development of the higher forms. This he did by tracing the progression in the reverse direction and observing the gradual changing, simplification and ultimate disappearance of the features distinguishing the higher forms as each lower scale is reached” (PMM). In Part II, Lamarck “developed his views on the physical nature of life, its spontaneous productions resulting in simple cellular tissue, and its characteristics at the simplest level, the lower ends of the plant and animal series … In [the third part] Lamarck deals in great detail with the problem of a physical explanation for the emergence of higher mental facilities … Lamarck’s breakthrough was tying a progressive development of higher mental facilities in a physical way to structural development of the nervous system … Higher mental faculties could emerge precisely because they were a product of increased structural complexity … For Lamarck one of the most important events in the evolutionary process was the development of the nervous system, particularly the brain, because at that point animals began to from ideas and control their movements” (DSB). Darwin initially discredited Lamarck’s theory but later redacted his opinion in the ‘Historical Introduction’ to the third edition of On the Origin of Species stating Lamarck “did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic as well as in the inorganic world being the result of law, and not of miraculous intervention” (PMM). “Lamarck’s great intellectual journey began with a public address about evolution, delivered in 1800 during a month that the revolutionary government had auspiciously named Floréal, or flowering. He then developed the first comprehensive theory of evolution in modern science – an achievement that won him a secure place in any scientific hall of fame or list of immortals – despite the vicissitudes of his reputation during his own lifetime and immediately thereafter” (Stephen Jay Gould, The Lying Stones of Marrakech, p. 141). ABPC/RBH record the sale of only three other copies since Norman, and certainly none of comparable importance to our copy.

Provenance: Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737-1816) (extensive annotations throughout in his hand).

“Lamarck states [in the Philosophie zoologique] that his new theory is needed in order to explain two well-known phenomena in the world of organisms. The first is that animals show a graded series of ‘perfection.’ Under increasing perfection Lamarck understood the gradual increase in ‘animality’ from the simplest animals to those with the most complex organization, culminating in man. He did not assess perfection in terms of adaptedness to the environment or by the role an organism plays in the economy of nature but simply in terms of complexity. The other phenomenon in need of explanation is the amazing diversity of organisms … A further ingredient added by Lamarck is the actual transformation of species in a phyletic line. ‘After a long succession of generations … individuals, originally belonging to one species, become at length transformed into a new species distinct from the first’ (pp. 38-39 – references here and below are to Elliott’s English translation, 1914). Everywhere in his discussions Lamarck reiterates the slowness and gradualness of evolutionary change … ‘An enormous time and wide variation in successive conditions must doubtless have been required to enable nature to bring the organization of animals to that degree of complexity and development in which we see it at its perfection’ (p. 50). This is no problem because for nature ‘time has no limits and can be drawn upon to any extent’ (p. 114).

“Numerous students of Lamarck's work have asked themselves what new observations or new insights had induced Lamarck to adopt this new viewpoint in 1800. What apparently happened was that, in the late 1790s, Lamarck took over the mollusk collection of the Paris Museum after the death of his friend Bruguière. When he started to study these collections which contained both fossil and recent mollusks, he found that many of the living species of mussels and other marine mollusks had analogues among fossil species. Indeed it was possible, in many cases, to arrange the fossils of the earlier and more recent Tertiary strata into a chronological series terminating in a recent species. In some cases where the material was sufficiently complete, it was possible to establish virtually unbroken phyletic series. In other cases, he found that the recent species extended far back into the Tertiary strata. The conclusion became inescapable that many phyletic series had undergone a slow and gradual change throughout time. Probably no other group of animals was as suitable for bringing about such a conclusion as the marine mollusks … The recognition of phyletic series was of particular importance to Lamarck because it solved for him a problem which apparently had disturbed him for a long time, the problem of extinction.

“Ever since the study of fossils had become more intense, it had become apparent that many of the fossil species are quite unlike the living ones. The ammonites, so abundant in many Mesozoic deposits, are one conspicuous example. The situation became more acute when fossil mammals were discovered in the eighteenth century, such as mastodons in North America and mammoths in Siberia. Finally, Cuvier described entire faunas of fossil mammals from various horizons of the Paris basin. The more sober naturalists and students of fossils eventually accepted the fact that the earth had been inhabited in former eras by creatures that had since become extinct, and not all of them at the same time …

“Most of the philosophers of the Enlightenment and the first half of the nineteenth century were deists. Their God was not allowed to interfere with the universe, once he had created it. Any such interference would be a miracle, and which philosopher could afford to support miracles after what Hume and Voltaire had said about them? This created a formidable dilemma. Either one had to deny the occurrence of extinction, which is what Lamarck did (more or less), or else one had to postulate a law established at the original time of creation to account for the steady disappearance and appearance of new species through geological time. But how could such a law ‘of the introduction of new species’ operate without being ‘special creation’? This was the (never fully articulated) objection Darwin raised against Lyell, who postulated such a law …

“The discovery of fossil species analogous to still living ones afforded Lamarck the long-sought-for solution to a major puzzle. ‘May it not be possible … that the fossils in question belonged to species still existing, but which have changed since that time and have been converted into the similar species that we now actually find?’ (p. 45) … Evolutionary change, then, was the solution to the problem of extinction …

“When drawing these conclusions, Lamarck at once noticed that this explanation was eminently logical for another reason. The earth has been forever changing during the immense period of time during which it had existed. Since a species must be in complete harmony with its environment and, since the environment constantly changes, a species must likewise change forever in order to remain in harmonious balance with its environment. If it did not, it would be faced with the danger of extinction. By introducing the time factor Lamarck had discovered the Achilles heel of natural theology. It would be possible for a creator to design a perfect organism in a static world of short duration. However, how could species have remained perfectly adapted to their environment if this environment was constantly changing, and sometimes quite drastically? How could design have foreseen all the changes of climate, of the physical structure of the surface of the earth, and of the changing composition of ecosystems (predators and competitors) if the earth was hundreds of millions of years old? Adaptations under these circumstances can be maintained only if the organisms constantly adjust themselves to the new circumstances, that is, if they evolve. Although the natural theologians, good naturalists that they were, had clearly recognized the importance of the environment and the adaptations of organisms to it, they had failed to take the time factor into consideration. Lamarck was the first to have clearly recognized the crucial importance of this factor …

“Buffon had considered the possibility of the transformation of a species into a closely related one, but had emphatically rejected applying the same conclusion to a possible transformation of entire families … Buffon had still stressed the immense gap between animals and man. Lamarck resolutely bridges this gap by considering man the end product of evolution. In fact, his description of the pathway by which our anthropoid ancestor became humanized is startlingly modern: ‘If some race of quadrumanous animals, especially one of the most perfect of them, were to lose by force of circumstances, or some other cause, the habit of climbing trees and grasping the branches with its feet in the same way as with its hands in order to hold on to them, and if the individuals of this race were forced for a series of generations to use their feet only for walking and to give up using their hands like feet there is no doubt … that these quadrumanous animals would at length be transformed into bimanous, and that their thumbs on their feet would cease to be separated from the other digits when they use their feet for walking’ and that they would assume an upright posture in order ‘to command a large and distant view’ (p. 170). Lamarck here presented his view on the origin of man with far more courage than Darwin fifty years later in the Origin. Man ‘assuredly presents the type of the highest perfection that nature could attain to: hence the more an animal organization approaches that of man the more perfect it is’ (p. 71). Since evolution is a continuing process, man will continue to evolve. ‘This predominant race, having acquired an absolute supremacy over all the rest, will ultimately establish a difference between itself and the most perfect animals, and indeed will leave them far behind’ (p. 171). Even though man has now acquired certain characteristics not found in any animal, or at least not to a similar degree of perfection, man, nevertheless, shares most of his physiological characteristics with the animals. These characteristics, very often, are more easily studied in animals than in man, and in order to achieve a full understanding of man, it is therefore ‘necessary to try to acquire knowledge of the organization of the other animals’ (p. 11).

“Lamarck recognized two separate causes as responsible for evolutionary change. The first was an endowment which provides for the acquisition of ever greater complexity (perfection). ‘Nature, in successively producing all species of animals, beginning with the most imperfect or the simplest, and ending her work with the most perfect, has caused their organization gradually to become more complex.’ The causation of this trend toward ever greater complexity is derived ‘from powers conferred by the ‘supreme author of all things’’ (pp. 60, 130) … The second cause of evolutionary change was a capacity to react to special conditions in the environment. If the intrinsic drive toward perfection were the only cause of evolution, says Lamarck, one would find an undeviating single linear sequence toward perfection. However, instead of such a sequence, in nature we encounter all sorts of special adaptations in species and genera. This, says Lamarck, is due to the fact that animals must always be in perfect harmony with their environment, and it is the behavior of animals which reestablishes this harmony when disturbed. The need to respond to special circumstances in the environment will, consequently, release the following chain of events: (1) Every considerable and continuing change in the circumstances of any race of animals brings about a real change in their needs; (2) every change in the needs of animals necessitates an adjustment in their behavior (different actions) to satisfy the new needs and, consequently, different habits; (3) every new need, necessitating new actions to satisfy it, requires of the animal that it either use certain parts more frequently than it did before, thereby considerably developing and enlarging them, or use new parts which their needs have imperceptibly developed in them ‘by virtue of the operations of their own inner sense’ …

“The crucial difference between Darwin’s and Lamarck’s mechanisms of evolution is that for Lamarck the environment and its changes had priority. They produced needs and activities in the organism and these, in turn, caused adaptational variation. For Darwin random variation was present first, and the ordering activity of the environment (‘natural selection’) followed afterwards. Hence, the variation was not caused by the environment either directly or indirectly.

“In order to provide a purely mechanistic explanation of evolutionary change, Lamarck developed an elaborate physiological theory based on the ideas of Cabanis and other eighteenth-century physiologists, invoking the action of extrinsic excitations and the movement in the body of ‘subtle fluids’ caused by the effort to satisfy the new needs. Ultimately these physiological explanations were Cartesian mechanisms, which were, of course, utterly unsuitable …

“Even though the higher taxa may appear to be separated from each other by major gaps, this is all merely a matter of appearance, for ‘nature does not pass abruptly from one system of organization to another.’ When discussing the ten classes of invertebrates recognized by him (p. 66), Lamarck insists dogmatically that ‘races may, nay must, exist near the boundaries, halfway between two classes.’ If we cannot find these postulated intermediates, it is due to their not yet having been discovered, either because they live in some remote part of the world, or owing to our incomplete knowledge ‘of past animals’ (p. 23) …

“The idea that an organ is being strengthened by use and weakened by disuse was, of course, an ancient one, to which Lamarck gave what he considered a more rigorous physiological interpretation. Still, he considered this one of the cornerstones of his theory, and dignified it as his ‘First Law.’ ‘In every animal which has not yet passed beyond the limit of its development, the more frequent and sustained use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops, and enlarges that organ, and gives it a strength proportional to the length of time it has been used; while the constant disuse of such an organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, progressively diminishing its faculties until it finally disappears’ (p. 113) …

“The second auxiliary principle of evolutionary adaptation is the belief in an inheritance of acquired characters. This is formulated by Lamarck in his ‘Second Law’: ‘Everything which nature has caused individuals to acquire or lose as a result of the influence of environmental conditions to which their race has been exposed over a long period of time – and consequently, as a result of the effects caused either by the extended use (or disuse) of a particular organ – [all this] is conveyed by generation to new individuals descending therefrom, provided that the changes acquired are common to both sexes, or to those which produce the young’ (p. 113).

“Lamarck nowhere states by what mechanism (pangenesis?) the inheritance of the newly acquired characters is effected … this concept was so universally accepted from the ancients to the nineteenth century that there was no need for Lamarck to enlarge upon it. He simply placed this principle in the service of evolution. Curiously, when Lamarckism had a revival toward the end of the nineteenth century, most of those who had never read Lamarck in the original assumed that Lamarckism simply meant a belief in the inheritance of acquired characters. Thus Lamarck received credit and blame for having originated a concept that was universally held at his time …

“Lamarck's contribution as an outstanding invertebrate zoologist and pioneering systematist was entirely ignored. Equally ignored was his important stress on behavior, on the environment and on adaptation, aspects of biology almost totally neglected by the majority of the contemporary zoologists and botanists whose taxonomy was purely descriptive. No writer prior to Lamarck had appreciated as clearly the adaptive nature of much of the structure of animals, particularly in the characteristics of families and classes. More than anyone before him, Lamarck made time one of the dimensions of the world of life …

“Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique (1809) signifies the first breakthrough of evolutionism. Yet, it required another fifty years before the theory of evolution was widely adopted. One must conclude that the creationist-essentialist world picture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was far too powerful to yield to Lamarck's imaginative but poorly substantiated ideas. Nevertheless, the existence of a groundswell of evolutionary thought is unmistakable. The gradual improvement of the fossil record, the results of comparative anatomy, the rise of scientific biogeography, and many other developments in biological science contributed toward making evolutionary thinking ever more palatable. But this did not mean that it made Lamarck’s eighteenth-century explanatory theories more acceptable” (Mayr, pp. 345-360).

Guyton de Morveau had long known and appreciated the seriousness of Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck’s work. The annotations in the present copy of Philosophie zoologique show him to be very interested in Lamarck’s theories, while at the same time maintaining a critical distance from them. This is expressed in several passages of his annotations, but is summarized clearly and concisely at the beginning of the work: “The author’s system is ingenious, but the principle and the distinction are not well founded. There is no doubt that life develops because of the gradation of organization; but it is not true that no matter has the faculty of feeling: to feel is quite different here from to perceive. Everything that lives feels. Sensibility is the attribute of life in the matter where it is instituted. The distinction between irritability and sensibility is not correct. Irritability is the effect of sensibility”. In general, however, the annotator declares: “This difference in my opinion does not prevent me from sharing the author’s opinion on the development of the faculties due to that of the gradual organization according to the scale” – he thus approves the principle of Lamarckian transformism, the basis of the theory of evolution, in contrast to several contemporary scholars.

Another important criticism addressed to the author is Guyton de Morveau’s rebuttal of the idea according to which plant life would be “due, as well as that of imperfect animals, to a single external and purely mechanical cause: plant life and animal life are instituted in bodies by the principles that create them. We must look for them in the combination of caloric, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen. It is not by a purely mechanical movement that the roots of plants seek and choose the juices that must nourish them and make them grow”. One senses here under the pen of Guyton de Morveau the disciple of both Buffon and Lavoisier.

Apart from these general criticisms, the remarks addressed to Lamarck are most often benevolent (“Exact definition”, “Nothing more just”, for example, about nature ...) or formulated as wise advice. Thus, he writes about the distinction of bodies: “Good classification but it is necessary to erase the word gross or brute, insignificant because it is here without application to the definition under which it is known or are known to us”.

Although Guyton de Morveau affects the neutral tone of scientific criticism and speaks of “the author” in the third person, one feels that his annotations are personally addressed to Lamarck. Volume I, p. 96, after the sentence “Les végétaux sont des corps organisés vivans, jamais irritables dans leurs parties, ne digérant point, et ne se mouvant ni par volonté, ni par irritabilité réelle” (Plants are organized living bodies, never irritable in their parts, not digesting, and moving neither by will, nor by real irritability), he calls out to the author and writes to him: “Say rather reduced”. This precious note makes it virtually certain that this copy was communicated by Lamarck to Guyton de Morveau so that the latter could make a critical reading of the work and add his comments on it. This makes it likely that this copy was returned to Lamarck with Guyton de Morveau’s autograph critical apparatus. This hypothesis is confirmed by the fact that the present work was not part of Guyton de Morveau’s library at his death on January 2, 1816 – the library was auctioned at his Parisian home at n° 63, rue de Bourbon, under the aegis of the auctioneer Lacoste aîné, and the auction catalogue survives – even though the catalogue does list other works of Lamarck, including his Recherches sur les causes des principaux faits physiques (1794) and his Hydrogéologie (1802).

“The son of a lawyer, Guyton added the title de Morveau (from a family property) to his name after he became a lawyer and a public prosecutor in 1762. During the French Revolution of 1789, however, he prudently dropped the title, and, unlike his colleague chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, he survived.

“Guyton was educated at the Jesuit school in Dijon. He later joined in the anticlericalism of the time, and in 1763 he published anonymously a long poem attacking the Jesuits. This literary effort helped to earn him a place in the Academy of Dijon, where a wide range of subjects, including chemistry, were discussed. Suitably inspired, Guyton taught himself more chemistry from textbooks and installed a laboratory in his home. In 1772 he published his first chemical memoir on phlogiston. It had recently been shown that many metals gained in weight when strongly heated in air, and Guyton devised a possible explanation of this fact despite the supposed escape of phlogiston. It was only in 1787, when he spent several months in Paris, that Lavoisier finally convinced him of the superiority of his oxygen theory of combustion. Meanwhile, Guyton had retired completely from his legal duties to devote more time to chemistry.

“Guyton had a strong instinct for reform, which is best illustrated by his work on the improvement of chemical nomenclature. Chemical substances until then had a whole range of unsystematic names, such as oil of vitriol (from the appearance of concentrated sulfuric acid) or Epsom salt (from its place of origin). In 1782 Guyton proposed that these substances be renamed vitriolic acid and vitriol (later sulfate) of magnesia, respectively. He also felt that names of discoverers should be avoided, so that Glauber’s salt, for example, would become vitriol of soda. In addition, he urged that compounds receive names to denote their constituent parts and that simple substances be given simple names. Such principles were adopted and extended in 1787, when Guyton collaborated with his fellow chemists Lavoisier, Claude-Louis Berthollet, and Antoine-François Fourcroy in a complete and definitive reform of names in inorganic chemistry in their book Méthode de nomenclature chimique (Paris, Cuchet, 1787) (????). https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1050402r.image. In this book, vitriolic acid first became sulfuric acid, and many other modern names were coined.

“Guyton’s fondness for a quantitative approach to chemical research is exemplified in his work on affinity, in which he tried to extend Isaac Newton’s inverse square law of gravitation to chemical forces of attraction. From 1776 he gave a public course of chemical lectures at the Academy of Dijon, which were collected and published as the Eléments de chymie (1777–78). With a growing reputation, he was commissioned in 1780 to write the first of two volumes on chemistry as part of a new encyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie méthodique … It was when he was composing the article on air, which included an account of combustion, that he visited Lavoisier and was converted to the oxygen theory. After Guyton finished the first chemistry volume, the second volume was to be written by Fourcroy, but further publication of the encyclopaedia was interrupted by the Revolution …

“In France most of science was controlled by the Paris Academy of Sciences, and Guyton, as a provincial, had been elected only to the subsidiary rank of correspondent (1772). During the Revolution, however, he became resident in Paris and qualified for full membership. Both he and Berthollet had been prominent in applying science to war and had earned the approval of the French government. These two were therefore nominated by the government to constitute the nucleus of the chemistry section in a reconstituted Academy in 1795. Guyton was also one of the founding professors of the École Polytechnique and was appointed its director in 1798–99 and again in 1800–04.

“In 1798 Guyton married Madame Picardet, who had helped him in the translation of many foreign scientific works. In 1801 he published a treatise on methods of disinfecting the air. He had previously recommended fumes of hydrochloric acid, but he now recommended the gas later called chlorine, which indeed was more effective but not for the reasons Guyton gave. He described a simple apparatus to prepare the gas. He was awarded the Legion of Honour for service to humanity, and in 1811 he became a baron” (Britannica).

A complete transcription of all the annotations in the present copy of the Philosophie zoologique is available on request.

Garrison-Morton 216; PMM 262; Norman 1267. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 1982.



Three parts in two vols., 8vo (195 x 122 mm), pp. [iv], [i], ii-xxv, [1], [1], 2-428; [iv], [1], 2-475, [1], including half-titles. Contemporary half-sheep, flat spines decorated in gilt and with red lettering-pieces (minimal wear). A fine and exceptionally important set.

Item #5541

Price: $55,000.00