258 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



St. Hilaire's method was professedly, though 

 not actually, inductive. Ideas, he said, should be 

 directly engendered by facts. His conceptions 

 were often a priori, but his demonstrations were 

 always a posteriori. In his speculation upon 

 Evolution, we see that St. Hilaire was by no 

 means always consistent with his method, but 

 was very largely influenced by certain classes of 

 facts which came under his direct observation, 

 and reasoned from these to laws touching facts 

 of quite a distinct character. Goethe says of him: 

 "He recalls Buffon in some points of view. He 

 does not stop at Nature existing or achieved ; he 

 studies it in the germ, in its development, and 

 in its future. He projects the idea of unity, which 

 Buffon had just touched upon." 



There were three branches of study in which 

 St. Hilaire was most deeply interested: first, 

 comparative anatomy; second, teratology or ab- 

 normal development; and third, what came to 

 be known as philosophical anatomy when he 

 finally embodied it in the Philosophie Anato- 

 mique, published in 1818. This was the work so 

 greatly admired by Goethe. The narrower range 

 of his studies, the dominating influence of his 

 'unity of type' principle and the sudden de- 

 partures from type seen in his teratological stud- 

 ies shaped the growth of St. Hilaire's limited and 

 peculiar view of Evolution. 



Geoffroy has been mistakenly spoken of as 



