History of Science - 6

History of Science - 6.

Edmond Halley.

Francis Willughby.

John Ray.

Carl Linnaeus.

Anders Celsius.

Comte de Buffon.

Jean Fourier.

Georges Cuvier.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck.

Etienne Geoffroy Saint Hillaire.

In the next century after Newton, the most profound change that took place,

was the growing realisation of the immensity of space, and the enormity of the span of past time.

Newton demonstrated the lawful orderly nature of the universe.

These ideas spread from physics to other areas like astronomy, geology,

biological sciences, evolution and chemistry.

The most important thing about Newton’s inverse square law of gravity, that it was universal.

It does so, at all times in the history of the universe.

Halley brought this to the attention of the scientific world.

Halley helped Newton publish Principia.

In spite of being poor, he also paid for the publication.

Halley had a salary of 50 pounds from the Royal Society.

Principia though written in Latin, sold moderately well, and Halley made a modest profit.

Halley kept out of politics, and kept busy with his scientific work, and duties at the Royal Society.

He questioned the accepted date of Creation of 4004 B.C.

This date was arrived at by counting all the generations in the Bible.

He thought that the Biblical flood happened more than 6000 years ago.

He estimated this by analysing the saltiness of the sea, assuming this had once been fresh.

He was regarded as something of a heretic by the church.

Halley was interested in terrestrial magnetism.

He had the idea that variation in magnetism from place to place across the globe,

could be a means of navigation.

He studied atmospheric pressure variations and published a paper the trade winds, and monsoons.

He produced a meteorological chart.

He carried out experiments on the sea floor at a depth of 18 meters.

He also worked out a scientific basis on which life insurance premiums are calculated.

In 1691, he published a paper showing how observations of a transit of Venus,

across the face of the sun, seen from different points on Earth,

could be used to measure the distance to the Sun.

He predicted that the next transits would occur in 1761 and 1769.

Halley was eager for an academic post in astronomy at Oxford.

But the church objected, and he was rejected, because of his views on the age of the Earth.

Halley puzzled over the fact, that objects of the same size, but made of different materials,

had different weights.

One of the implications of Newton’s work was that the weight of an object depends on its mass.

Since a lump of gold is 7 times heavier than a similar lump of glass,

he reasoned that glass must have 6/7th empty space.

This led him to think about the idea of atoms.

He tried to find a way to measure their sizes.

He did some experiments and estimated that a cube of gold 1/100th of an inch long would contain,

more than 2433 million atoms.

This was published in the Royal Society in 1691.

In 1693, along with Middleton a wealthy fellow of the Royal Society, he made a proposal to the Admiralty,

for a expedition for improving navigation at sea, in particular by studying terrestrial magnetism in

different parts of the globe.

On the direct orders of Queen Mary II, a small ship known as a pink was built and launched in 1694.

’When William the Orange invaded England in 1688, his fleet included 60 pinks’.

It took 2 years to fit out the ship.

In the mean while Halley developed his interest in comets.

Halley exchanged letters with Newton, showing that many comets move around the Sun in elliptical orbits,

in accordance with the inverse square law.

He suspected that the comet seen in 1682, had been seen at least 3 times before,

at intervals of 75 or 76 years.

Flamsteed who had the accurate observations of the comet in 1682, would not share this information,

with Halley, because he was no longer in speaking terms with him.

Halley’s ship expedition was delayed for various reasons.

In the mean while Newton appointed him as the warden of the royal mint, to oversee currency reforms.

Halley, held this post till 1698.

The planned ship expedition was now taken up the Royal Navy, under William III.

Halley was commissioned as a commander in the Royal Navy, and given command of the ship.

Before he left, Halley met Tsar Peter the great, who was in England to study ship building techniques.

The expedition began in 1698.

Halley’s first lieutenant, Edward was a career Navy officer.

He resented being put under the command of a landsman, Halley.

When the vessel was in West Indies, Edward retired to his cabin and let Halley navigate the ship alone,

hoping that Halley would make a fool of himself.

Halley navigated the ship with great aplomb.

He did magnetic observations all the way upto 52 degrees south,

which was nearly the tip of South America.

He returned to England in triumph in 1700.

In 1701, he studied the tides of the English channel.

He carried out clandestine surveys of harbour defences of French ports.

In 1702, Queen Anne sent him as an envoy to Austria.

He seemed to have carried out some spying also, for which he was secretly paid.

In 1710, he was appointed to the Savilian chair.

He published a book on the astronomy of comets, for which he is well known.

He predicted in the book that the 1682 comet,

in accordance with Newton’s law would return around 1758.

During this time Flamsteed was preparing more accurate star tables as an aid to navigation,

at the Royal Greenwich observatory.

He did not publish the data, because he was not paid enough by the crown.

In 1710, Queen Anne appointed Newton as a the visitor to the observatory,

with authority to demand for Flamsteed’s data.

Halley was appointed to put the material in order.

Flamsteed’s star catalogue was published in 1712.

A new version was published in 1725, by his widow, 6 years after his death.

The catalogue gave star positions of about 3000 stars, to an accuracy of 10 seconds of arc.

Halley compared Flamsteed’s material, with that of Hipparchus put together in the second century BC.

He found that most of the readings of Hipparchus was close to Halley’s more accurate reading.

In a few cases, they were very different, then what was measured 2000 years earlier.

The conclusion was that these few stars moved across the sky since the time of Hipparchus.

This was the last nail in the coffin of the crystal sphere idea.

Evidence that the stars move relative to one and another,

is also evidence that the stars are in different distances from us.

It gave credence to the idea that stars are other suns, at such huge distances,

that they show up as tiny pinpoints of light.

It took nearly a 100 years before the distances to the nearest stars were measured.

When Flamsteed died in 1719, Halley now 63, succeeded him as astronomer royal.

He carried out a full program of observations, including a complete 18 years cycle of lunar motions.

It was too late to use it for navigation problems, because of the advent of portable chronometers.

In spite of suffering a slight stroke, Halley continued his observations till his death, in 1742,

at the age of 85.

The object now known as Halley’s comet appeared as predicted in 1758.

This was a triumphant vindication of Newton’s theory of gravity, and the laws of mechanics,

spelled out in the Principia.

160 years later, observations of the total eclipse of the sun would set the seal,

on Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

In 1761 and again in 1769 the transits of Venus predicted by Halley,

were observed from more than 60 stations around the world.

The techniques he had spelt out 50 years earlier was used to calculate the distance to the sun.

This distance worked out to 153 million kilometers,

which was impressively close to the modern measurement of 149.6 million kilometers.

Halley made this contribution to science 27 years after he died.

He left the world on the brink of an understanding of the true immensity of space and time.

Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born in 1731.

Halley was the Astronomer Royal, and Newton was dead for only 4 years.

The discussion of evolution can start with the work of Francis Willughby.

Francis was a naturalist, and his book on fishes did not sell,

and left the Royal Society in dire financial straits.

Because of this, Halley had to pay from his pocket for the publication of Principia.

Francis did not write the book.

He had a partnership with the greatest naturalist of the 17th century, John Ray,

who laid the foundation of the scientific study of the natural world.

Ray was born in England in 1627.

He was one of the three children of the village blacksmith.

His mother was a herbalist and folk healer, who used plants to treat sick villagers.

He went to grammar school and received a through grounding in Latin.

Most of his scientific work was written in Latin.

With the help of the local vicar he went to Cambridge when he was 16.

He could not afford the fees, and with some difficulty he got a scholarship.

This was at the height of the civil war.

Cambridge was firmly in the hands of the parliamentary or Puritan faction.

He became friends with Isaac who was a royalist, and they shared rooms.

He graduated in 1648, and then became a fellow of Trinity.

He did not take the holy orders.

Over the next dozen years, he held teaching posts in Greek, mathematics and humanities.

He was fascinated by plants.

He set out to create a classification system for them.

Francis was a member of a minor aristocracy, who had an interest in the natural world.

He became one of the founding fellows of the Royal Society at the age of 25.

He came to Cambridge in 1652, and became a member of Ray’s circle of naturalist,

and a friend of Ray.

In 1660 Ray published the Cambridge catalogue, which described the plant life around the university.

Life for Ray changed with the restoration of the Royalists.

There was some turmoil, and Ray resigned all his posts in the university,

and became an unemployed cleric.

He was rescued by his friend, Francis.

He took Ray on a trip to Europe, where they would study beasts, fishes, and insects.

Ray concentrated on studying plant life.

When Ray returned to England, he had a comprehensive picture of the living world.

He also had access to a large number of specimen, sketches,

and observations made by him and his friends.

In 1667, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Francis married in 1668, and had three children.

Francis became seriously ill and died in 1672, when he was 37.

Francis left a will, where Ray was given an annuity of 60 pounds a year,

and the responsibility of education of the two sons of Francis.

It was taken for granted that girls needed no education.

Francis’s widow did not like him, and he had to move out of the house hold.

Ray married in 1673, to a girl 24 years younger to him.

They had four daughters.

Ray spent the next 25 years working on books, setting the biological world in order.

Out of gratefulness to Francis, he published his book on ornithology in Francis’s name.

He then published the book, history of fishes, in 1686 also in Francis’s name.

Ray’s first love was botany.

He wrote the history of plants in three volumes, from 1686 to 1704.

The book covered more than 18000 plants.

He classified them in terms of their family relationships, morphology, distribution and habitats.

He also listed their pharmacological uses.

He described general features, such as, the process of seed germination.

Most important of all, he established the species as the basic unit of taxonomy.

It was Ray, who established the very concept of a species, in the modern sense.

Ray died in 1705, at the age of 77.

He left a rough draft of the book ‘History of insects’, which was published posthumously in 1710.

It was Ray who made the study of botany and zoology a scientific pursuit.

He brought order and logic to the investigation of the living world.

Before that it was chaos.

He invented a clear taxonomic system based on physiology, morphology, and anatomy.

This paved the way for the more famous Linnaeus, who drew heavily on Ray’s work.

Though deeply religious, Ray found it difficult to reconcile the biblical account of creation,

with the evidence before his own eyes.

He came close to suggesting that species can change, as generations pass.

He was the first to recognise that fossils are the remains of once living creatures and plants.

He puzzled over the idea, that the absence of living forms of fossilised species now.

It seemed to imply that whole species have been wiped out from the face of the Earth.

Ray’s puzzlement accurately reflects the way people struggled for an understanding,

of the immensity of the span of the geological time.

Ray’s work followed by the work of Linnaeus, was the precursor to the theory of evolution.

Linnaeus was born in Sweden in 1707.

His family wanted him to become a clergyman, like his father, but he showed no interest.

His father was about to apprentice him to a shoe maker,

but his teacher suggested that he could make a career in medicine.

With the aid of sponsorship from patrons,

Linnaeus completed his medical studies at the university of Lund and Uppsala.

Linnaeus was interested in flowering plants, since he was a child.

At the university, he learnt about botany, far beyond the curriculum of medical students.

He was particularly fascinated by the idea of the botanist Sebastain, that plants reproduced sexually.

Linnaeus never fully understood the role of insects in pollination,

but he was the first to accept and use the idea of sexual reproduction in plants.

He developed the idea of using the differences between the reproductive parts of a flowering plant,

as a means of classifying and cataloguing the plants.

He was an obsessive cataloguer who made lists of everything.

In 1732, he was sent on a major expedition to Lapland, to study botanical species.

In 1734, he went on another expedition to central Sweden.

He completed his medical degree in Holland in 1735.

In 1739, he married the daughter of a doctor.

He practised as a physician in Stockholm till 1741,

and he was appointed to the chair of medicine at Uppsala.

In 1742, he switched to the chair of botany, which he held till he died in 1778.

Linnaeus was a vain man, with a inflated idea of his own importance.

Nevertheless he was a charming man, and popular teacher.

His students spread his ideas about taxonomy far and wide.

Even as a student Linnaeus published his book ‘Systema Naturae’ in 1735.

Linnaeus is now best remembered, for the binomial system of classifying,

every species with a two word name.

The term Homo sapiens came into being after his book ’Species Plantarum’ in 1753.

The idea of giving two word names goes back to ancient times,

but Linnaeus turned it into a systematic method of identification, with precise ground rules.

He provided the binomial description of 7700 species of plants, and 4400 species of animals.

This was just about everything known in Europe at that time.

Linnaeus arranged everything in the living world in an hierarchy of family relationships.

The classification was according to kingdom, class, order, genus and species.

From then on biologists followed this system of classification.

The last vestige of Latin, formerly the universal language of science,

is still found in this classification system, even today.

Linnaeus was the first person to include ‘man’ in a system of biological classification.

The idea of classifying man in the same way as animals, was controversial in the 18th century.

Man was classified by Linnaeus,

in the Kingdom Animalia,

in the Phylum Chordata,

in the Sub Phylum Vertebrata,

in the Class Mammalia,

in the Order Primates,

in the Family Hominidae,

in the Genus Homo,

in the Species sapiens.

Homo sapiens was unique in being the only member of the genus Homo.

He wrote in 1746 that, he could not find any characteristics,

which enabled man to be distinguished on scientific principles from an ape.

Modern studies have confirmed the similarities between the DNA of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas.

According to this man should be classified as a chimpanzee, Pan sapiens.

It is only Linnaeus’s fear of arousing the wrath of the theologians,

that Homo sapiens sits in unique and isolated splendour as the sole member of a genus.

Linnaeus was religious and believed in God.

He saw himself as uncovering God’s handiwork.

He however doubted the Bible, when it came to the question of the age of the Earth.

In 1740, there was a controversy in Sweden, following the discovery that the level of the Baltic sea,

seemed to be going down.

Anders Celsius known today for his temperature scale,

presented convincing evidence of the change in the level of the Baltic sea.

One of the possible explanations of Celsius was built upon an idea of Newton,

that water is turned to solid matter by the action of plants.

When plants decay, they form solid matter which is carried into the seas by rivers.

This settles at the bottom and builds up new rocks.

Linnaeus also built a similar model, which turned out to be wrong.

What is significant is that, these investigations led Linnaeus to consider the age of the Earth.

In 1660’s Steno made the connection between shark’s teeth and fossil remains,

found in rock strata far inland.

Steno said, that different rock’s data had been laid now under water,

at different times in the history of the Earth.

Many of his successors in the 18th and 19th century, identified this process with the Biblical flood.

Linnaeus believed in the Biblical flood.

But he found it strange that a short lived flood could have moved living things far inland,

and covered them in sediments.

Linnaeus realised that it will require more than 6000 years of history allowed by the Bible,

for the changes in the Earth to take place, but he did not openly say it.

In 1620, an archbishop had calculated date of creation as 4004 BC.

At that time information about China just started trickling in.

The first recorded emperor of China was about 3000 BC.

Even then Linnaeus could not openly state that the Earth should be much older than 4004 BC.

It was Buffon who carried out the first scientific experiment to determine the age of the Earth.

Buffon was born in 1707 in France.

His great grandparents were peasants.

His father was a minor civil servant in the administration of salt tax.

In 1714, Buffon’s maternal uncle died, living a huge fortune to Buffon’s mother.

Using this money he purchased an entire village called Buffon, from which he derived his name.

Buffon was a typical nouveau riche person, who was a vain social climber throughout his life.

He graduated from Jesuit college in law.

He had also studied mathematics and astronomy.

He met the second Duke of Kingston, England, who was in his late teens, and was on a grand tour.

The duke travelled with an entourage of servants, and possessions in several coaches.

He stayed in magnificent lodgings for weeks or months.

Young Buffon aspired to be like the Duke.

His mother died in 1731.

Buffon travelled through Europe, and returned to Paris in 1732.

Buffon’s father remarried in 1732.

His father attempted to appropriate the entire family fortune including Buffon’s share.

Buffon had to fight with his father for his share of the inheritance.

He got his share of the fortune, which included the village of Buffon.

He never spoke to his father again.

Buffon’s income was 80000 livres a year.

To maintain a gentleman’s life, required only 10000 livres a year.

He managed his estate and business successfully and profitably.

Buffon also developed an interest in natural history.

He felt that he was lazy.

He had a peasant to drag him out of bed at 5 a.m. everyday.

For the next fifty years, he would start work as soon as he was dressed.

He worked hard to produce one of the most momental and influential works in the history of science.

He published Historie Naturelle in 44 volumes between 1749 to 1804.

The last 8 volumes was published after he died in 1788.

It was the first work to cover the whole of natural history.

It was written in a clear manner which made them popular best sellers.

It added to Buffon’s wealth, and spread interest in science widely at that time.

His books encouraged and stimulated other researchers to become naturalists.

From 1739 he was in charge of the king’s botanical gardens in Paris.

In the 1730’s Buffon became noticed in scientific circles for his publications on mathematics.

He did experiments in silviculture, aimed at providing higher quality wood for ships of the French Navy.

Buffon became an associate of the Academie des Sciences in 1739, when he was 31.

He married in 1752, at the age of 44 to a girl 20 years old.

They had one daughter who died, and two sons.

His wife died in 1769.

His son Buffonet inherited his title.

Buffonet was guillotined in 1794 after the French revolution.

Buffon’s important contribution to science was the speculation that,

the Earth was formed out of material thrown out of the Sun,

as the result of the impact of a comet on the sun.

Newton had a similar idea.

The idea suggested that the Earth formed in a molten state, and gradually cooled to the point,

where life could exists.

Newton thought that this would take more than 50000 years.

Buffon tried to calculate, how long this would take by devising some experiments.

He heated iron balls of different sizes, until they were red hot, and timed how long it took to cool.

He extrapolated this data to the Earth, and arrived at an estimate of 75000 years for the age of the Earth.

This is way far from the current estimate of 4.5 billion years.

What is important is that his estimate was more than 10 times, from that inferred from the Bible.

This bought science into direct conflict with theology.

Jean Fourier was the next generation scientist, to estimate the age of the Earth.

He was so stunned by the result of his calculations, that he did not publish it.

Fourier lived from 1768 to 1830.

He is best known today for his work in mathematics.

He served as a scientific advisor to Napoleon in Egypt.

He was made a Baron and then a Count for his services to the empire.

He survived the upheaval of the restoration of king Louis XVII.

He achieved a position of prominence in French science.

He developed a mathematical techniques for dealing with time varying phenomena.

His techniques of Fourier analysis are still used at the forefront of scientific research today.

For example, astronomers use it to measure the variability of stars or quasars.

Fourier did not develop his technique for the love of mathematics.

He needed them to describe mathematically the way heat flows from a hotter object to a cooler one.

He used these techniques to calculate how long it would have taken for the Earth to cool.

He made allowance for the factor, that Buffon had overlooked.

The solid crust of the Earth acts like an insulating blanket for its molten interior.

It restricts the flow of heat, so that the core is still molten today, even though the surface is cool.

He seems to have destroyed the paper in which he calculated the age of the Earth.

He however left for posterity a formula written in 1820, for calculating the age of the Earth.

Fourier’s formula gives the age of the Earth as 100 million years.

By 1820 science was getting closer to the vast timescale of history.

Buffon’s other contribution was coming to terms, with the evidence,

from fossil bones of the antiquity of life on Earth.

He argued that heat alone was responsible for creating life.

He said since the Earth was hotter in the past, it was easier to make living things.

This is why he thought, the ancient bones of mammoths and dinosaurs were so big.

He also hinted at the idea of evolution.

These ideas were discussed long before the work of Charles Darwin.

He had written that plants had its ancestors, and animals had their ancestors.

In his publications, he outlined that the ape and man are from the same family,

and come from a common ancestor.

He presented a clear argument against living creatures having been designed by the Creator.

However, he didn’t express this conclusion in as many words.

Buffon was also involved in how sexual reproduction worked.

There were 3 schools of thought.

One held that the seed of future generations was stored inside the female,

and the male partner triggered it into life.

One held that the seed came from the male, and the female’s role was only to nurture it.

One held that contributions from both partners was essential.

This explains they said, why a baby has its father’s eyes and mother’s nose.

Buffon subscribed to the third view, but he had a horribly complicated model.

Buffon died in 1788.

Cuvier picked up where Buffon had left off, in the 1780’s.

Cuvier was born in 1769 in France.

Cuvier’s father was a mercenary officer in a French regiment.

The family was not financially well off.

They had a patron, Comte de Waldner who became Cuvier’s godfather.

From the age of 12, Cuvier visited his uncle, who was a pastor,

and who had a complete collection of Buffon’s Historie Naturelle.

Cuvier was fascinated by it, and spent hours absorbed in it.

He also went to the country side to collect his own specimens.

Cuvier’s parents wanted him to become a pastor.

He was turned down for a free place at the university.

But the family was too poor to pay the fees.

A visiting duke offered him a free place at the university of Stuttgart.

Cuvier joined this university in 1784, at the age of 15.

The university was a training ground for civil servants, to become administrators,

in the many states of fragmented Germany at that time.

It was run like a military establishment, with uniforms, rigid code of conduct, and strict rules.

It however provided a superb education and a guaranteed job.

When Cuvier graduated in 1788, the situation reversed, and there was no guaranteed job.

Cuvier took up the post of a tutor to a family in Normandy.

Normandy was remote from the political upheavals in Paris.

Cuvier was able to pursue his botanical and zoological interests.

The French revolution is officially marked as 14th July 1789, when the storming of the Bastille took place.In 1791 the royal family made a unsuccessful attempt to flee.

Normandy was caught up in the turmoil, and university was closed.

There was rioting in the streets, triggered by hunger.

The aristocratic family, he was tutoring was threatened.

The family and Cuvier moved permanently to a summer residence.

France became a republic.

Cuvier had the opportunity to become a real field naturalist.

He followed the footsteps of Linnaeus in identifying and describing hundreds of species.

He developed his own ideas about how species are to be classified.

He began to publish in leading French journals and made a name for himself.

France then entered, the most vicious stage of the revolution, the period known as the Terror.

It began with the execution of Louis XVI and Mary Antoinette in 1793.

More than 40000 opponents of the Jacobin regime were executed at that time.

Cuvier wisely chose to be with them.

He worked for sometime, as a secretary to them on a salary of 30 Livres a year.

Cuvier then joined the museum of natural history, as assistant to the professor of comparative anatomy.

He rose to a senior position, and held the job for the rest of his life.

He published his master work, Lectures in comparative anatomy.

He was often short of money, and took up a variety of jobs.

Cuvier was probably the most influential biologist in the world.

He married in 1804, and had 4 children.

He was made a Baron in 1831.

Cuvier set new standards in comparative anatomy.

He compared the body plans of meat eating and plant eating animals.

He was able to show that they had distinctive features.

He realised that all forms of life cannot be represented in a single linear system,

linking lower forms of life with higher forms, with man at the top of the ladder of creation.

He arranged all animals into 4 major groups.

The classification is no longer in use, but it was a significant advance in thinking about zoology.

He applied these ideas to study of fossil remains.

He reconstructed extinct species and almost single handedly invented the science of paleontology.

He was able to place the strata in which fossils were found in order.

He was able to say which fossils were of an earlier age, and which ones of a later age.

He was able to provide clear evidence that many species, that lived on Earth were now extinct.

He thought that there was a series of catastrophes, of which the biblical flood was the latest.

Cuvier realised that the history of life on Earth, went back at least hundreds of thousands of years.

His ideas about fixity of species, brought him into conflict with some of his French contemporaries,

and set back the study of evolution in France.

He died in 1832.

The ideas that Cuvier opposed were that of Lamarck.

Lamarck was born in 1774.

He was a protege of Buffon.

He worked at the museum of natural history in Paris, before Cuvier.

From 1809, he developed a model of evolution.

It was based on the idea that characteristics can be acquired by an individual during its lifetime,

and then passed on to succeeding generations.

The differences between Lamarck and Cuvier,

was that Lamarck thought that new species never went extinct, but developed into another form,

while Cuvier thought no species ever changed, but could be wiped out by catastrophes.

Lamarck’s ideas were taken up and promoted by Geoffroy, a close contemporary of Cuvier.

Geoffroy developed variations on the evolutionary theme, which went beyond Lamarck’s ideas.

He suggested that there might be a direct role of the environment in evolution.

He suggested that the environment might produce changes in living organisms.

His ideas were tantalisingly close to Darwinism.

Because of Cuvier, the idea was not taken forward.

Cuvier and Geoffroy were initially firm friends.

Later a professional antipathy built up between them.

In 1818, Cuvier went ballistic, when Geoffroy published work that claimed to prove,

that all animals were built on the same body plan.

He elaborated that different parts of insect’s body, corresponds to various parts of a vertebrate.

In 1830, a year after Lamarck died, Cuvier launched a blistering attack on Geoffroy’s ideas,

about relationships between vertebrates, insects and molluscs, and the idea of evolution.

Cuvier held firmly to the idea that species once created stayed fixed in the same form,

till they were extinct.

He urged young naturalists to only describe the natural world,

and not waste time to explain the natural world.

Under the weight of his authority, Lamarck’s ideas of evolution was buried, and remained so till Darwin.