308 THE ORGANISM AS AN HISTORICAL BKING 



powerful influence exercised at the time by materialistic 

 habits of thought. Teleology had become a bugbear to the 

 vast majority of biologists, and all real understanding of the 

 Cuvierian attitude seems, in most cases, to have been lost, 

 although, curiously enough, teleological conceptions were 

 often unconsciously introduced in the course of discussions 

 on the " utility" of organs in the struggle for existence. 



Evolutionary morphology, being for the most part a form 

 of pure or non-functional morphology, agreed then in all 

 essential respects with pre - evolutionary or transcendental 

 morphology. 



But it contained the germ of a new conception which 

 threw a new light upon the whole science of morphology. 

 This was the conception of the organism as an historical 

 being. 



We have seen this thought expressed with the utmost 

 clearness by Darwin himself (supra, p. 233). In his eyes the 

 structure and activities of the living thing were a heritage 

 from a remote past, the organism was a living record of the 

 achievements of its whole ancestral line. What a light this 

 conception threw upon all biology ! " When we no longer 

 look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship as some- 

 thing wholly beyond his comprehension ; when we regard 

 every production of Nature as one which has had a long 

 history ; when we contemplate every complex structure and 

 instinct as the summing-up of many contrivances, each 

 useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great 

 mechanical invention is the summing-up of the labour, the 

 experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous 

 workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far 

 more interesting I speak from experience does the study 

 of natural history become ! " (Origin, 6th ed., pp. 665-6). 



Sedgwick expressed the same thing from the morpho- 

 logical point of view when he wrote, with reference, to the 

 ancestral significance of the blastopore : " If there is any- 

 thing in the theory of evolution, every change in the embryo 

 must have had a counterpart in the history of the race, and 

 it is our business as morphologists to find it out " (p. 49, 1884). 



By the evolution-theory the problems of form were linked 

 indissolubly with the problem of heredity. Unity of plan 



