i 



1 08 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



We perceive that Bueli is here led to the fundamental 

 idea of the Theory of Descent by the phenomena of the 

 geography of plants, a department of biological knowledge 

 which in fact furnishes a mass of proofs in favour of it. 

 Darwin has minutely discussed these proofs in two separate 

 chapters of his book (the 11th and 12th). Buch's remark is 

 further of interest, because it leads us to the exceedingly 

 instructive comparison of the different branches of language 

 with the species of organisms, a comparison which is of the 

 greatest use to Comparative Philology, as well as to Compara- 

 tive Botany and Zoology. Just as, for example, the different 

 dialects, provincialisms, branches, and off-shoots of the 

 German, Slavonic, Greco-Latin, and Irano-Indian parent lan- 

 guage, are derived from a single common Indo- Germanic 

 parent tongue, and just as their differences are explained by 

 Adaptation, and their common fundamental characters ex- 

 plained hy Inheritance, so in like manner the different species, 

 genera, families, orders, and classes of Vertebrate animals 

 are derived from a single common vertebrate form of animal. 

 Here also Adaptation is the cause of differences, Inheritance 

 the cause of community of character. This interesting 

 parallelism in the divergent development of the forms of 

 speech and the forms of organisms has been discussed in 

 the clearest manner by one of our first comparative philolo- 

 gists, the talented Augustus Schleicher, whose premature 

 death, four years ago, remains an irreparable loss, not only 

 to our University of Jena, but to the whole of monistic 

 science.^ 



Among other eminent German naturalists who have ex- 

 pressed their belief in the Theory of Descent more or less 

 distinctly, arriving at their conclusion in very various ways. 



