SOME EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS. 327 



Thus the decade between 1745 and 1755 was marked by the appear- 

 ance of the attack of Maupertuis upon the ruling doctrine of prede- 

 lineation; by the publication of the volumes of the 'Histoire ISTaturelle' 

 which familiarized even the general reader with the unity of type and 

 the homologies of structure that ran through the most diverse species 

 in the writings of the three most celebrated French leaders of scientific 

 opinion of the time; and by the setting forth of two distinct lines of 

 argument in favor of that hypothesis. From this decade, then, dates 

 the appearance of modern evolutionism, as a theory definitely formu- 

 lated and based upon its proper embryological and anatomical premises. 



III. Herder. — If certain of the French philosophes have received 

 less credit than is their due for their evolutionary opinions, Herder, on 

 the contrary, has often been praised for an early profession of faith in 

 the doctrine of the transformation of species, whereas it is by no means 

 clear that he did not intend explicitly to repudiate it. A German 

 writer, Barenbach,* has written a book to show that Herder was a 

 precursor of Darwin, and declares that in his 'Ideen zur Geschichte 

 der Menschheit' Herder laid down 'the fundamental laws of the 

 modern development theory, and of the Darwinian theory in par- 

 ticular, ' and that he gave clear expression to ' The law of the evolution 

 of organisms, and the theories of the struggle for existence and of 

 natural selection.' Professor Osborn's account of Herder's relation 

 to the theory apparently follows Barenbach, and as a result is rather 

 misleading. Herder, says Osborn, probably was helped to his evolu- 

 tionism by 'coming under the influence of Kant's earlier views.' But 

 "Herder was less cautious than his master, and appears almost as a 

 literal prophet of the modern natural philosophy. In a general way 

 he upholds the doctrine of the transformation of the lower and higher 

 forms of life, of a continuous transformation from lower to higher 

 types and of the law of perfectibility. " "In his ' Ideen, ' published in 

 Tubingen in 1806, ... we see that Herder clearly formulated the 

 doctrine of unity of type which prevailed among all the evolutionists 

 of the period immediately following." 



These few sentences contain a rather undue proportion of errors, 

 and the whole exposition of Herder's position from which they are 

 taken is substantially wrong. It is worth while, therefore, to attempt 

 a more accurate account of Herder's attitude towards evolutionism 

 than is to be found in the current writings on the subject. In a matter 

 of this kind, even accuracy about dates is not wholly to be disdained; 

 and it should be observed that the 'Ideen' were published, not at 

 Tubingen in 1806, but at Riga and Leipzig in 1784-5. Again, Herder, 

 although once a pupil, was no disciple of Kant's; the author of the 



* Herder als Vorganger Darwin's ; cf. the same writer's monograph on 

 Herder in 'Der neue Plutarch, VI.' My citation is from the latter work; the 

 former is not accessible to me. 



