FROM LAMARCK TO ST. HILAIRE 267 



(later independently reached by Oken and 

 Owen) of the vertebrate nature of the skull, 

 which, indeed, was only a part of his contribu- 

 tion to comparative osteology and anatomy. 



As a student in Leipzic and Strasburg he came 

 under the influence of Bacon, Spinoza, Bruno 

 and Kant; he was familiar with Linnaeus and 

 with the great French and German anatomists 

 of the close of the eighteenth century. He op- 

 posed the dominance of Linnaeus as to the fixity 

 of species in the following terms : 



The conviction that everything must be in exist- 

 ence in a finished state, if one is to bestow upon it 

 proper attention, had completely befogged the cen- 

 tury , . . and so this way of thinking has come 

 down as the most natural and most convenient from 

 the seventeenth to the eighteenth, and from the eigh- 

 teenth to the nineteenth century. . . .^ 



Goethe partly anticipated Lamarck as an evo- 

 lutionist in his Metamorphoses of Plants, but, 

 unlike his French contemporary, he did not 

 formulate a system, although he made the most 

 substantial contributions to the scientific evi- 

 dences of the theory of descent versus fixity. It 

 is astonishing that Goethe never came across the 



iPor this and other Goethe citations see Albert Bielschowsky: 

 The Life of Goethe, vol. Ill, 1912, pp. 83, 88, 95-6. We are in- 

 debted to Albert Bielschowsky for a masterly review of Goethe 

 the naturalist and to Professor William A. Cooper of Stanford 

 University for a splendid translation. 



