8 GENERAL EVOLUTION. 



and snakes, and he whose hours were spent over his lens ceased 

 to be a mere wonder monger. But fashion is fashion, and always 

 ends in absurdity and stagnation. The physiophilosophs became 

 extravagant, and mistook superficial appearances for realities. 

 They did not dream how misleading some of the resemblances 

 between different elements, for example, of the skeleton may be, 

 and for once German students did not analyze exhaustively. Cu- 

 vier laughed at these seekers for beauty, and confounded the true 

 and the untrue in one condemnation. But the best men labored 

 forward ; errors began to be exposed, and soon a reaction set in. 

 Another extreme followed, and the school of Miiller, at Berlin, 

 denied the meaning of these resemblances and ceased to see any- 

 thing but differences. Minute and thorough investigation flour- 

 ished in their hands, and the modern school of German anatomists 

 has seen no superiors. So the theory of evolution found Berlin. 

 The disfavor in which physiophilosophy was held secured to evo- 

 lution a cold welcome, and it has been for Jena and other univer- 

 sities to give it its true impetus in Germany. 



So it has been with the law of parallelism. Some of the 

 physiophilosophs declared it, stating that the inferior animals 

 were merely the repressed conditions of the higher. This view 

 was taught by some men in high position in France. Their state- 

 ments were, however, too broad and uncritical. The father of 

 embryology, von Baer, of Koenigsberg, declared there was ^'heine 

 Rede^^ of such theory, and Lereboullet stated '* that it is founded 

 on false and deceptive appearances." Even Professor Agassiz in 

 our day has asserted that no embryonic animal is ever the same as 

 the adult of another, though he also once informed the writer that 

 the embryology of two nearly related species had never been studied 

 and compared. This was subsequently done by Professor Hyatt, 

 of Salem, for the nautilus and ammonite division of mollusks, and 

 at about the same time by the writer, for many species of our na- 

 tive frogs and salamanders, and the result has been a complete 

 clearing up of the confusion about parallelism, and the clear estab- 

 lishment of the law. 



The results attained are these : The smaller the number of 

 structural characters which separate the two species when adult, 

 the more nearly will the less complete of the series be identical 

 with an incomplete stage of the higher species. As we compare 

 species which are more and more different, the more necessarily 

 must we confine the assertion of parallelism to single parts of the 



