204 CLOSE OF THE PRE-EVOLUTIONARY PERIOD 



chief disciple, recanted not a whit of his doctrine of recapitu- 

 lation, but re-affirmed and expanded it from time to time, 

 and particularly in a lengthy memoir published in i860. 1 

 But in general we may say that pure morphology in the 

 Geoffroyan or Okenian sense was becoming gradually 

 discredited. A curious indication of this is seen in the fact 

 that not only the idea but the very word " Archetype" came 

 to be regarded with suspicion. Thus even J. V. Carus, who 

 had much affinity with the transcendentalists, wrote of the 

 vertebrate archetype (which he took over almost bodily from 

 Owen) " It may here be observed that this schema may be 

 used as a methodological help, but it is not to be placed in 

 the foreground " (loc. cit., p. 395). Huxley, who was definitely 

 a follower of von Baer, was much more outspoken with regard 

 to ideal types. In an important memoir on the general 

 anatomy of the Gastropoda and Cephalopoda, 2 he set himself 

 the task of reducing all their complex forms to one type. 

 In summing up, he writes : " From all that has been stated, 

 I think that it is now possible to form a notion of the 

 archetype of the Cephalous Mollusca, and I beg it to be 

 understood that in using this term, I make no reference to 

 any real or imaginary 'ideas' upon which animal forms are 

 modelled. All that I mean is the conception of a form 

 embodying the most general propositions that can be 

 affirmed respecting the Cephalous Mollusca, standing in the 

 same relation to them as the diagram to a geometrical 

 theorem, and like it, at once imaginary and true" (i., p. 176). 

 Again, in his Croonian lecture on the theory of the vertebrate 

 skull, he remarks that a general diagram of the skull could 

 easily be given. "There is no harm," he continues, "in 

 calling such a convenient diagram the ' Archetype ' of the 

 skull, but I prefer to avoid a word whose connotation is so 

 fundamentally opposed to the spirit of modern science " 

 (Sci. Mt'n>irs, vol. i., p. 571). 



It is instructive to find that between Serres and Milne- 

 Edwards there existed the same antagonism as between von 



1 " Principes d'Embryogcnie, de Zoogcnie ct de Terntogcnie," Mem. 

 Acad. Sci., xxv., pp. 1-943, pis. xxv., 1860. 



2 "On the Morphology of the Cephalous Mollusca," Phil. Trans., 

 1853, Sci. Memoirs, i., pp. 152-92. 



