VON BAER AND CUVIER 129 



the same sheer intellectual power, the same sanity of mind, 

 the same synthetic grip. Von Baer, like Cuvier, never 

 forgot that he was working with living things ; he was 

 saturated, like Cuvier, with the sense of their functional 

 adaptedness. In his paper on the external and internal 

 skeleton l he gives a masterly analysis of the functional 

 modifications of the limbs in Vertebrates, and the whole 

 paper indeed, with its sober attack on transcendentalism, is 

 a vindication as much of the functional point of view as of 

 the importance of embryology. 



Both Cuvier and von Baer, by the very sanity of their 

 views, found themselves in partial opposition to the theories 

 current in their time. Cuvier was the critic of Geoffroy and 

 the transcendentalists, of Lamarck and the believers in the 

 Echelle des ctrcs^ evolutionary or ideal. Von Baer also, 

 though influenced greatly by NaturpJiilosophie, turned against 

 the exaggerations of the transcendental school, and by his 

 unanswerable criticism of the theory of parallelism took 

 away the ground from those who too easily believed in an 

 historical evolution.' 2 



We have seen what were von Baer's criticisms of the 

 theory of parallelism. If we turn to the later writings 

 of Cuvier we find the essential criticism expressed in similar 

 terms. Speaking of an attempt which had been made 

 to show that fish were molluscs developed to a higher 

 degree, he wrote in i823, 3 " Let us draw the conclusion that 

 even if these animals can be spoken of as ennobled molluscs, 

 as molluscs raised to a higher power, or if they are embryos 

 of reptiles, the beginnings of reptiles, this can be true of 

 them only in an abstract and metaphysical sense, and that 

 even this abstract statement would be very far from giving an 

 accurate idea of their organisation." From the fact that the 

 respiratory and circulatory organs of fish greatly resemble 

 those of tadpoles the conclusion has been drawn that fish are 



1 " Ueber das iiussere und innere Skelet," Meckel's Archiv fiir Anat. 

 it. Physiol., pp. 327-76, 1826. See, too, his Entwickelungsgeschichte, i., 

 pp. 181, ff. 



' Von Baer wrote an appreciative biography of Cuvier, published 

 posthumously in 1897, Lebensgeschichte Cuviers, ed. L. Stieda. French 

 trans, in Ann. Set. Nat. (Zool.\ ix., 1907. 



3 Cuvier et Valenciennes, Histoire naturelle des Poissons, i., p. 550. 



