Zoological Philosophy: LAMARCK, Jean-Baptiste (1744-1829) Illuminating the World

LAMARCK, Jean-Baptiste (1744-1829). Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals. London: Macmillan & Co., 1914. Large octavo (225 x 155mm); pp. xcii, 410, [2] (good condition). Original green cloth, with gilt spine titling (a little rubbed and handled; spine with a slight lean). Provenance: Heffer's (of Cambridge, early bookseller's label) - J.Z. Young FRS (1907-1997; zoologist and neurophysiologist, ownership stamp sporadically applied throughout). The first edition in English of Lamarck's Philosophie zoologique (1809), translated by the materialist philosopher of science Hugh Elliot and published just over a century after the French original. This copy from the library of the eminent zoologist and neurophysiologist J.Z. Young (1907-1997). Lamarck's work is perhaps the most famous precursor of Darwin's theory of evolution, and was one of the first substantial treatises to challenge the fixity of species. Its importance is belied by the notoriety of 'the inheritance of acquired characteristics,' and (at least in mid-century debates over evolution) by neo-Lamarckianism, especially Lysenkoism. Yet Lamarck was an inspiration for Darwin and laid out, in systematic form, a coherent (if incomplete) theory of evolution. Now, with the rise of epigenetics, Lamarck's ideas are undergoing another renaissance. John Zachary Young was one of the twentieth century's pre-eminent biologists, renowned as 'the outstanding zoologist and teacher of zoology at Oxford from 1930 to 1945' (Royal Society obituary). His textbook The Life of Vertebrates (1950) became a classic (and cites the present volume), but in fact featured relatively little of the research for which he was to become famous, namely the discovery of the squid giant axon, and his extensive work on the nervous system. After WWII Young turned increasingly to the science of the mind, conducting an important correspondence with Alan Turing, and writing many philosophical and methodological works. At Oxford, when he acquired this book, he was under the guidance of two of the most able neo-Darwinians of the era, Gavin de Beer and E.S. Goodrich. The book has been carefully read, with pencil marks alongside passages throughout, and one partially erased pencil note. Young's Oxford teaching was marked by its universality: Peter Medawar recalled that Young 'taught the whole of his subject'. In his autobiography Young emphasizes the centrality of Darwinian evolution to his work at Oxford; here we see him engaging historically with his subject.