of inanimate matter, and ‘bestow on them an arrangement widely different from 
that which the laws of chemistry and mechanics would have assigned them’ (6). He 
then characterized the differences between animate and inorganic creation, and 
discussed Lamarck's failure to recognize the action of irritability in plants :
 

Mr Lamarck in his introduction to his valuable Histoire naturelle des animaux 
sans vertèbres … refers some of the movements which are here considered as 
indicating the existence of irritability in plants, to the influence of the 
mechanical or chemical powers, and others, to what he terms ‘vital orgasms’. All 
these different actions, however, occur in continuation with the vital 
principle, and their entire dependence on the laws of inorganic matter is a 
gratuitous assumption.
 

Although Fleming professed the strongest opposition to the ‘materialistic’ 
tenets of Lamarck, even a cursory reading of his book reveals that he followed 
in detail many of Lamarck's ideas. He fully accepted Lamarck's binary system of 
classification and recognized the validity of a taxonomic model based on the 
development of the nervous system, an idea developed by Julien-Joseph Virey 
(1775-1846) and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), and consistently applied (with 
obviously different overtones) by Lamarck. On several occasions Fleming 
expressed his admiration for Lamarck, who had overcome the difficulties facing 
such systems of classification, especially in the case of those many classes of 
animals characterized by a diffuse nervous system. Nevertheless, in following 
Lamarck's methods the Scottish naturalist carefully dissociated himself from 
other aspects of Lamarck's theory relating to the development of the nervous 
system.
 

It is not our intention to occupy the time of the reader in a refutation of an 
author who, in his delineation of the mental powers of animals, substitutes 
conjectures for facts, and speculations for philosophical induction. Fortunately 
for his reputation, he possesses much real merit as a systematic naturalist 
(8).
 

Eight years later, in the midst of his fierce polemic with William Sharp MacLeay 
(1792-1856) about the latter's quinary system, Fleming repeated his praise of 
Lamarck, the defender of the system of progressive development who ‘has greatly 
excelled all his predecessors, in the number of his examples, and the freedom of 
the announcements’. Nevertheless, ‘all the scheme is a dream of imagination’, 
since geological remains testified against Lamarck's theory (9). Fleming's 
opponent, MacLeay, whom Fleming accused of having absorbed many of his ideas 
from Lamarck, answered by repeating the view of Lamarck which he had expressed 
in his Horae entomologicae (1819) ; it is noteworthy that MacLeay believed in 
1819 that Lamarckism had no followers in England :
 

His peculiar and very singular opinions have never gained many converts in his 
own country and I believe none in this. They are indeed only to be understood by 
those who are already supplied with the means of refuting them, so that the 
mischief they may have occasioned being comparatively 

(6) John Fleming, The philosophy of zoology, London, 1822. i, 7.

(7) Ibid., p. 14.

(8) Ibid., pp. 311-12.

(9) [J. Fleming], review of J. E. Bicheno's On systems and methods in natural 
history, in The quarterly review, 1829, 41, 302-28 (321).