260 ANIMAL MORPHOLOGY 



phological researches, as to the work assignable to other branches 

 of biology. 



Natural history was able in its turn to aspire to the title, explana- 

 tory and nature-conquering science. And if this transformation of 

 opinion does not occur more promptly and more nearly simultane- 

 ously in all countries of high scientific culture, the fault is largely 

 that of the naturalists themselves, for their obstinacy in preserving 

 ancient dogmas, for their defiance of valuable ideas for which the 

 authors have been ignored at first in their own country. 



So long as biologists obstinately support the view of Cuvier and 

 of R. Owen that vegetable and animal species are immutable and 

 that the supreme end of science is classification, it is evident that 

 the history of living beings can be only the exact description of 

 their external form and of their internal structure in the adult and 

 in the larval states, the comparison of these forms and of these 

 structures, the study of the habits, that is to say, the relations 

 of the organisms among themselves and to the environment, the 

 distribution of these organisms over the surface of the earth con- 

 sidered as the result of caprice or of the intelligence of an omnipo- 

 tent Creator. Outside of their practical applications (the utilization 

 by man of animal or vegetable products), natural history yet can 

 give enjoyments similar to those that we experience at the sight 

 of an object of art, of a kind, however, of which the technique 

 escapes us, and of which the results remain for us an inexplicable 

 enigma. 



But the point of view changes entirely, if in the place of con- 

 sidering creation in a static state as a whole, thenceforth immut- 

 able, we consider it from the dynamic point of view; if we no longer 

 study the natura naturata, but the natura naturans, in seeking to 

 discover the relationships of living beings, and to unravel the com- 

 plicated processes by which forms and organisms are determined 

 and related to one another; if we cease to admire devotedly the 

 harmonies of animals and vegetables either among themselves or 

 with the surroundings which environ them, and to hold to the 

 childish finality of which Bernardin de St. Pierre has given us the 

 most perfect expression; if, in a word, we abandon the anthropo- 

 centric method in order to seek to explain how these harmonies 

 gradually became established or modified as the conditions of the 

 environment in which they were realized were being established 

 or modified. 



Even as early, as 1877 at the congress of German physicians and 

 naturalists which met that year at Munich, one of the first and most 

 ardent protagonists of the Darwinian doctrine, Ernest Haeckel, could 

 proclaim with entire justice: "By the theory of descent, biology 

 in general, and especially zoology and systematic botany, are truly 



