SERRES AND MILNE-EDWARDS 205 



Baer and the German transcendentalists. Milne-Edwards 

 was a constant critic of the law of parallelism which Serres 

 continued to uphold with little modification for over thirty 

 years, just as 'von Baer was a critic of that form of the 

 doctrine which was current in the early part of the century. 

 As early as 1833, Milne-Edwards, through his studies of 

 crustacean development, 1 had come to the conclusion, 

 independently of von Baer, that development always 

 proceeded from the general to the special ; that class 

 characters appeared before family characters, generic 

 characters before specific. In an interesting paper published 

 in i844, 2 he discussed the relation of this law of development 

 to the problems of classification, and arrived at results almost 

 identical with those set forth by von Baer in his Fifth 

 Scholion. 



Like von Baer he rejected completely the theory of 

 parallelism and the doctrine of the scale of beings ; like von 

 Baer he held that the type of organisation of which there 

 are several is manifested in the very earliest stages and 

 becomes increasingly specialised throughout the course of 

 further development ; like von Baer, too, he sketched a 

 classification based upon embryological characters. 



These views were further developed in his volume of 1851, 

 and also in his Rapport of 1867. 



They brought him into conflict with his confrere in the 

 Academy of Sciences, Etienne Serres, who in a number of 

 papers published in the 'thirties and 'forties, 3 and particularly 

 in his comprehensive memoir of 1860, still maintained the 

 theory of parallelism and the doctrine of the absolute unity 

 of type. His memoir of 1860 shows how completely Serres 

 was under the domination of transcendental ideas. Much of 

 it indeed goes back to Oken. " The animal kingdom," he 

 writes, " may be considered in its entirety as a single ideal 

 and complex being "(p. 141). His views have become a little 

 more complicated since his first exposition of them in 1827, 



1 " Observations sur les changements de forme que les divers Crus- 

 taces eprouvent," Ann. Set. nat. (i) xxx., p. 360, 18.33. 



2 " Considerations sur quelques principes relatifs a la classification 

 naturelle des animaux," Ann. Set. nat. (3) i., p. 65, 1844. 



3 Supra, pp. 79-83. Also Precis cPanatomie transcendante, principes 

 (f organogenic, Paris, 1842. 



