no THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 



necessary, not merely upon philosophical grounds, but upon 

 those of experience and observation.^ 



Victor Cams, of Leipzig, in the Introduction to his 

 excellent "System of Animal Morphology,"^ published in 

 1853, in which he endeavours to establish in a philosophical 

 manner the universal constructive laws of the animal body 

 through comparative anatomy and the history of develop- 

 ment, makes the following remark : — " The organisms buried 

 in the most ancient geological strata must be looked upon 

 as the ancestors from whom the rich diversity of forms of 

 the present creation have originated by continued genera- 

 tion, and by accommodation to progressive and very different 

 conditions of life." 



In the same year (1858) Schaaffhausen, the anthropologist 

 of Bonn, in an Essay " On the Permanence and Transforma- 

 tion of Species," declared himself decidedly in favour of the 

 Theory of Descent. According to him, the living species of 

 animals and plants are the transformed descendants of ex- 

 tinct species, from which they have arisen by gradual modi- 

 fication. The divergence or separation of the most nearly 

 allied species takes place by the destruction of the connect- 

 ing intermediate stages. Schaaffhausen also maintained, 

 with distinctness, the origin of the human race from ani- 

 mals, and its gradual development from ape-like animals, the 

 most important deduction from the Doctrine of Filiation. 



Lastly, we have still to mention among the German Nature- 

 philosophers the name of Louis Bilchner, who, in his cele- 

 brated work, "Force and Matter" (1855), also independently 

 developed the principles of the Theory of Descent, taking 

 his stand mainly on the ground of the undeniable evidences 

 of fact which are furnished by the palajontological and in- 



