THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 27 



I have no wish to reproach Virchow for being 

 wholly fettered by the one-sided views of the modern 

 school-physiology, nor because morphology lies so far 

 out of his ken that he has not been able to form an 

 independent judgment of its aims and methods ; but 

 when, in spite of all this, he on every occasion lets 

 fall a disparaging judgment of it, we must dispute his 

 competence. It is true that in his Munich address he 

 emphasises the statement, " That which graces me best 

 is that I know my ignorance," by printing it in italics. 

 I only regret that I am forced to deny his possession 

 of this very grace. Virchow does not know how 

 ignorant he is of morphology, else he would never 

 have uttered his annihilating verdict on it, else he 

 would not continually designate the study of the 

 theory of descent as dilettanteism and vain dreaming, 

 as " a fanciful private speculation which is now making 

 its way in several departments of natural science." 

 In truth, Virchow does me greatly too much honour 

 when he designates as my " personal crotchet " an idea 

 which for the last ten years has been the most precious 

 common possession of all morphological science. If 

 Virchow were not so unfamiliar with the literature 

 of morphology, he must have known that it is pene- 

 trated throughout by this principle of descent, that 

 every morphological inquiry which conscientiously 

 pursues a well-considered problem now assumes the 



