EVOLUTION BEFORE DARWIN 27 



he considered the skull as a continuation of the spinal 

 column and as consisting of vertebrae peculiarly 

 modified. This theory, according to which every 

 organ developed from some other organ modified, was 

 very similar to the theory according to which every 

 species developed from some other species. Goethe 

 added that this transformation must have been due 

 to the influence of the environment : 



"All members develop themselves according to eternal laws 

 And the rarest form mysteriously presents the primitive type. 

 Form, therefore, determines the animal's way of life, 

 And in turn, the way of life powerfully reacts upon all form. 

 Thus, the orderly growth of form is seen to hold, 

 Whilst yielding to change from externally acting causes." * 



In 1794, a few years after the publication of the 

 "Metamorphosis of Plants," Erasmus Darwin, 

 Charles Darwin's grandfather, embodied similar 

 views in a book entitled "Zoonomia," in which he main- 

 tained, among other things, that the resemblance ob- 

 servable between the arm of a man and the wing of 

 a bird betokened a positive relationship between the 

 two species. 



Lamarck was the first, however, to put the idea 

 of transmutation into accurate wording. What in 

 the mind of Goethe and of Lamarck's other prede- 

 cessors had only been a rather vague and perhaps 



iFrom a poem, The Metamorphosis of Animals, quoted by Haeckel in 

 The Natural History of Creation, 1874, page 79. 



