ANTICIPATION AND INTERPRETATION 35 



argued that the fact that man had no intermax- 

 illary bone at present was no proof that he did 

 not have it in Galen's time. "It is luxury," he 

 said, "it is sensuality which has gradually de- 

 prived man of this bone." This passage proves 

 that the idea of degeneration of structure 

 through disuse, as well as the idea of the in- 

 heritance of the effects of habit, or the 'trans- 

 mission of acquired characters,' is a very ancient 

 one. It remained for Goethe to actually discover 

 in man a case of a free or separate intermaxil- 

 lary bone and give it its true philosophic inter- 

 pretation as proof of human descent from a more 

 primitive type. 



Development, the antithesis of degeneration, 

 the increasing perfection of structure in course 

 of Evolution, was the central thought of Aris- 

 totle's natural philosophy, but the term itself, as 

 applied to the gradual increase in organs and sin- 

 gle structures in the evolutionary sense, was first 

 clearly used by Lamarck. 



Embryonic development was rightly conceived 

 a priori by Aristotle in the form of epigenesis, 

 for he regarded the embryo as a mass of particles 

 containing the potential capacity of development 

 into the form of the adult. The term 'Evolution' 

 was first introduced for the embryological the- 

 ory as opposed to epigenesis, namely, that the 

 embryo contained the complete form in minia- 



