THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 167 



the Congress. The geologist, Otto Volger, made a 

 polite but energetic protest against the new theory 

 in the final sitting. It was a curious connection of 

 things that brought Volger into such a position. 



Volger is the man who saved for Germany the 

 venerable Goethe-house at Frankfort-on-the-Main. 

 The Free German Chapter received it from him 

 as a gift. The action has nothing to do with 

 geology, but it stands in the annals of culture. 

 Thus the shadow of Goethe came to Stettin, to be 

 present at the open birth of German Darwinism 

 Goethe, who had once stood on the very brink of 

 the evolutionary ideas. And the man who brought 

 him was a geologist who felt moved to attack the 

 ideas of Darwin and Haeckel ! 



No part of science became in the succeeding 

 decades so fruitful for Darwinistic purposes as 

 geology. It might very well be called a continuous 

 argument for Darwin ; from the little slab of 

 Solenhofen Jurassic schist that yielded, in 1861, 

 the first impression of the archeopteryx, the 

 real connecting link between the lizard and the 

 bird, to the incomparable discoveries of Othniel 

 Marsh, Cope, and Ameghino in America, which 

 put whole sections of the genealogical t^ee of the 

 mammals before us, on to the skull and thigh- 

 bone of the ape-man (pithecanthropus) of Java, 

 found by Eugen Dubois, which brings so vividly 

 home to us the transition from the gibbon to man. 

 But, as if it had been scared away by the new idea 

 of evolution and its demand for proof, the most 

 and the best of this material was not forthcoming 



