



THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 23 



entirely and for ever abandoned the province of the 

 history of development, at which for twenty years he 

 had laboured incessantly, and where he had earned 

 splendid laurels. To escape from the haunting and 

 importunate ideas of the science which had so wholly 

 absorbed him, he fled from Konigsberg to Petersburg, 

 and subsequently busied himself in scientific inquiries 

 of a quite different character. Twenty-five long years 

 passed by, and when Darwin's work appeared in 1859, 

 Von Baer had too long undergone a metapsychosis to 

 be able to understand it. In Von Baer, as in Virchow, 

 the course of this remarkable metapsychosis is highly 

 instructive, and will itself afford to the thoughtful 

 psychologist an interesting evidence of the doctrine of 

 evolution. 



However, the lack of comprehension of our modern 

 evolution-hypothesis is easier to explain in Virchow's 

 case than in Von Baer's, for this reason: morphological 

 knowledge was greatly lacking to Virchow, while Von 

 Baer possessed it in the highest degree. Now mor- 

 phology is precisely that very department of inquiry 

 in which our theory of descent has its deepest and 

 strongest roots, and has matured the most glorious 

 fruits of knowledge. The study of organic forms, or 

 morphology, is thus, more than any other science, 

 interested in the doctrine of descent, because through 

 this doctrine it first obtained a practical know- 



