There are a thousand ways of refuting this error without the possibility of a reply....

This hypothesis, the best of all those which had been imagined when Lavoisier conceived it, cannot now be longer held, since I have discovered what is really _caloric_" (p.

161).
After paying his respects to Priestley, he asks: "What, then, can be the reason why the views of chemists and mine are so opposed ?" and complains that the former have avoided all written discussion on this subject.

And this after his three physico-chemical works, the _Refutation_, the _Recherches_, and the _Memoires_ had appeared, and seemed to chemists to be unworthy of a reply.
It must be admitted that Lamarck was on this occasion unduly self-opinionated and stubborn in adhering to such views at a time when the physical sciences were being placed on a firm and lasting basis by experimental philosophers.

The two great lessons of science--to suspend one's judgment and to wait for more light in theoretical matters on which scientific men were so divided--and the necessity of adhering to his own line of biological study, where he had facts of his own observing on which to rest his opinions, Lamarck did not seem ever to have learned.
The excuse for his rash and quixotic course in respect to his physico-chemical vagaries is that he had great mental activity.