368 NATURAL SCIENCE. December. 1896. 



Darwin, was merely an insufficient inventory of short differentiating 

 characteristics arranged with a view to comprehensibility, after his 

 time developed into a pedigree expressing true blood-relationship, 

 and will, in the next period of our science, be unable to dispense 

 entirely with experimental research. 



Looking back, we see how in all the chief branches of zoological 

 science the theory of descent newly formulated by Darwin has 

 become the motive of a thoroughness in research, not found in any 

 earlier period. It is characterised by the preponderance of the 

 morphological interest, which has led to such a one-sided neglect of 

 physiology, that to-day, when the development of morphology forces 

 the formulation of questions whose answers experiment alone can 

 supply, neither the methods of work nor the worker himself are at 

 hand to solve them. 



Morphology, seeking for explanations, threatened to become a 

 victim of a new edition of the Schelling-Oken natural philosophy, had 

 she not in healthy self-knowledge already mapped out the new path, 

 which led the way out of danger. Still governed by the slowly dying 

 exclusively morphological standpoint, zoology begins to recognise as 

 her new aim, the " doctrine of the causes of organic formation," and 

 Roux has even founded a journal devoted only to this subject. 5 But 

 this title does not comprehend the whole domain now to be striven 

 for, which can perhaps be better called, " Comparative Physiology," 

 or " Biomechanics." ^° Darwinism "has steeped the old descriptive 

 zoology with the philosophical spirit and made out of it a historical 

 doctrine — it remains for the coming generation to transform it into a 

 causal science resting on a basis of Experiment. 



LuDwiG VON Graff. 



^ " Archiv fiir Entwickelungsmechanik," edited by W. Roux, Leipzig, 1894, &c. 



1° Y. Delage, " Une Science Nouvelle : la Biomecanique " (i?«t^K£ generale des 

 sciences pures et appliquees. 6e. annee, No. 10. Paris, 1895). 



