CHAPTER XVII 



THE ORGANISM AS AN HISTORICAL BEING 



"OF late the attempt to arrange genealogical trees involving 

 hypothetical groups has come to be the subject of some 

 ridicule, perhaps deserved. But since this is what modern 

 morphological criticism in great measure aims at doing, it 

 cannot be altogether profitless to follow this method to its 

 logical conclusions. That the results of such criticism must 

 be highly speculative, and often liable to grave error, is 

 evident." 



The quotation is from Bateson's paper of 1886, and it is 

 symptomatic of the change which was soon to come over 

 morphological thought. New interests, new lines of work, 

 began to usurp the place which pure morphology had held 

 so long. 



This is accordingly a convenient stage at which to take 

 stock of what has gone before, to consider the relation of 

 evolutionary morphology to the transcendental and the 

 Cuvicrian schools of thought which preceded it, and to 

 make clear what new element evolution-theory added to 

 morphology. 



The close analogy between evolutionary and transcendental 

 morphology has already been remarked upon and illustrated 

 in the last three chapters. We have seen that the coming of 

 evolution made comparatively little difference to pure 

 morphology, that no new criteria of homology were intro- 

 duced, and that so far as pure morphology was concerned, 

 evolution might still have been conceived as an ideal process 

 precisely as it was by the transcendcntalists. The principle 

 of connections still remained the guiding thread of morpho- 

 logical work ; the search for archetypes, whether anatomical 



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