IGNORABLMUS ET RES T RING A MUR. i r i 



neither explain nor comprehend all the manifold and 

 infinitely complex form-phenomena of the animal 

 and plant worlds without this theory, because to us 

 transmutation contains the only possible, rational ex- 

 planation of organic types, that we all regard it as the 

 indispensable basis of the scientific doctrine of form, 

 and as demanding no further proofs of its certainty 

 than those which now lie in abundance before us. 



Du Bois-Keymond, and still more Virchow, ignore 

 these proofs, because they are to a great extent ignorant 

 alike of the inquiries and results, of the methods 

 and the aims of our modern morphology, and this 

 ignorance may be accounted for partly by the one- 

 sided direction which their biological studies have 

 taken, partly by the fact that there are few univer- 

 sities where the study of morphology is so behindhand 

 as at the University of Berlin. Fully twenty years 

 have now elapsed since the great Johannes Miiller 

 died, the last naturalist who could command all the 

 departments of biology. The three great provinces of 

 science which had been reunited into a triune kino-- 



O 



dom under his powerful sceptre, were then divided 

 among three professors' chairs : Du Bois - Eeymond 

 took that of physiology, Virchow, theoretical pathology 

 (pathological anatomy and physiology), and the third, 

 and most important chair, that of morphology (human 

 and comparative anatomy, including the history of 



