A common phenomenon did however occur during the first decades of the century, 
as, incidentally, was to be the case after the publication of the Darwin’s work 
: the name of Lamarck (or, after 1859, that of Darwin) was often cited to 
promote or give authority to ideas that authors had already developed by 
themselves or to systems of dubious theoretical or epistemological syncretism.
 

The systematic study of European naturalistic circles will allow the process of 
translation and adaptation of Lamarck in different linguistic and cultural 
contexts to be evaluated. It is clear that the key question is not the study of 
the diffusion or reception of Lamarck's ideas, but the process of transformation 
and accommodation of Lamarck's theoretical formulations by local traditions in 
natural history (where one often finds a prior and widely spread commitment to 
the idea of the adaptation of living creatures to their environments as an 
ongoing process).
 

The study of the European students of Lamarck should thus be placed in a 
problematic context that cannot abstract from a realistic and comprehensive 
assessment of the European naturalistic culture from the end of the eighteenth 
century to the first half of the nineteenth, thereby refusing the often 
anachronistic priorities dictated by the preoccupation with contemporary issues 
in biology. One cannot dispense with enquiring into the modes of textual 
diffusion, the circulation of men and ideas, the methods of reading and 
interpreting with which groups of naturalists working in completely different 
political, scientific and social conditions approached the works of Lamarck, or 
into the proposals for critical revisions of certain parts of the Lamarckian 
theoretical corpus put forward by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire or Bory de 
Saint-Vincent, or by the representatives of local cultures such as Robert Edmund 
Grant, Andrea Bonelli, Baden Powell, or N.G. Chernyshevskii and Andrei 
Nikolaevich Beketov (17). 

(17) J.A. Rogers, "The Russian Populist Response to Darwin", in Slavic Review, 
22, 1963, pp. 456-458 and "Darwinism and Social Darwinism", in Journal of the 
History of Ideas, 33, 1972, pp. 265-280; A. Vucinich, Science in Russian 
Culture, 1861-1917, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1970; F. M. Scudo and 
M. Acanfora, "Darwin and Russian Evolutionary Biology" in D. Kohn, ed. The 
Darwinian Heritage, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985, pp. 731-754.