SOME EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS. 329 



order that higher beings may be nourished thereby. Even if one wholly 

 disregards the final causes of the creation, yet even in the very raw 

 material of Nature there lies the necessity that one being should come 

 out of many, that in the revolving cycle of creation countless multitudes 

 should be destroyed so that through this destruction a nobler but less 

 numerous race might come into being" (Bk. X., ch. 2). "Man, 

 therefore, if he was to possess the earth and be lord of the creation, 

 must find his kingdom and his dwelling-place made ready; necessarily 

 therefore, he must have appeared later and in smaller numbers than 

 those over whom he was to rule" (ibid.). Most of this Herder might 

 have got from Buffon ; and there is obviously nothing in these passages 

 which necessarily implies the mutability of species, nothing which is 

 inconsistent with the doctrine of special but gradual creation. Nor 

 is there even in such a passage as this : " From air and water, from 

 heights and depths, I see the animals coming nearer to man, and step 

 by step approximating his form. The bird flies in the air; every 

 deviation of its structure from that of the quadruped is explicable from 

 its element. The fish swims in the water : its feet and hands are trans- 

 formed into tail and fins," etc. (Bk. II., ch. 3). If Herder had not 

 elsewhere seemed to deny such a theory, we might at first sight be dis- 

 posed to construe this passage as an assertion of the literal transforma- 

 tion of species — a Lamarckian sort of transformation, due to the 

 adaptation of organs to needs. But when the words are closely scruti- 

 nized it is evident that they require no such interpretation. They say 

 no more than that animals came into being in a progressive order in 

 which the human type was steadily approximated, and in which each 

 form was adapted to its environment. 



2. In this connection, Herder liked to dwell upon the homologies 

 of form and structure observable in all vertebrates, and indeed, as he 

 thought, in all creatures, even those that are outwardly most dissimilar. 

 There is a certain Hauptform or Hauptplasma in which the whole 

 animal kingdom agrees. "It is undeniable that, amid all the differ- 

 ences of the living beings on the earth, a certain uniformity of structure 

 and, as it were, a standard form, appears to prevail, which yet is trans- 

 formed into the richest diversity. The similarity of the skeletal struc- 

 ture of land animals is obvious; . . . the inner structure makes the 

 thing especially evident, and many outwardly uncouth forms are in the 

 essentials of their internal anatomy exceedingly like man. The 

 amphibia deviate farther from this standard; birds, fishes, insects, 

 aquatic animals — the last of which merge in the vegetal or inorganic 

 world — deviate still farther. Beyond this our eyes can not penetrate; 

 but these transitions render it not improbable that in marine forms, 

 plants, and even in the so-called inanimate things the same basis of 

 organization may rule, though infinitely more rude and confused. In 



