22 CERTAIN EVIDENCE OF 



important problems of his ' youthful labours which 

 opened up new paths of inquiry. "While in his 

 early years he laid down principles of the greatest 

 value to our modern doctrine of evolution, and even 

 went very near to adopting this hypothesis into 

 his system, at a later period he utterly denied it, 

 and by his writings on Darwinism proved that he was 

 no longer generally capable of mastering this difficult 

 problem. As I am one of Von Baer's warmest admirers, 

 and in my " Evolution of Man," as well as in the 

 " History of Creation," and in other places, have most 

 emphatically expressed that sincere esteem, I thought 

 I might venture to forbear from calling attention to 

 the discrepancy between the lucid, monistic principles 

 of Von Baer in his youth, and the confused dualistic 

 views of his old age. But as many opponents of 

 Darwinism and among them particularly the Old 

 Catholic philosopher of Munich, Huber, who has written 

 a series of articles in the " Augsburger Zeitung " have 

 made constant capital out of the harmless talk of the 

 feeble old Von Baer, I must in this place explicitly 

 declare that this dualistic prating of the old man is 

 quite incapable of shaking the monistic principles of 

 the young and enterprising pioneers of science, or of 

 giving them the lie. 



In his autobiography Von Baer gives us the ex- 

 planation of this striking contradiction. In 1834 he 



