The Last Harvest by John Burroughs

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.