ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



299 



tion and replace it by the correcter doctrine of epigenesis 

 — i.e., of repeated or after-formation. I Taller^ thought 

 very highly of this attack on liis own view, hut was 

 not convinced by it : and although in botany Wolfi's 

 views on the cellular structure of plants were adopted 

 in France by Mirbel, and those on metamorphosis were 

 unknowingly reproduced ]»y Goethe, his influence on em- 

 bryology dates actually only from the year 1812, when 

 Meckel translated one of his treatises and thus drew 

 attention to his great merits. Wolll" tried to refute the 

 theory of evolution or pre-formation, supplanting it by 

 that of epigenesis or after -formation, through actual 

 observations of the development of germs in plants and 

 animals in definite instances. Tn l)otany his views, 

 after lying dormant for a long period, led ultimately to 

 the famous cellular theory of Schleiden and IVlohl. Tn 

 zoology, shortly after Meckel's republication of his treatise 

 in 1812, there were published the researches of Pander, 

 who, in his treatise on the development of the chick, 

 " gave a fuller and more exact view of the phenomena 

 less clearly indicated by Wolft*, and laid the foundation 

 of the views of all sul)sequent embryologists." ^ 



Pander was a Eussian by l)irth, anil so was his greater pamierana 



n K. E. von 



contemporary and friend, Karl Ernst \-on l5aer, a man Baer. 



' As Prof. J. Ailhur Thomson 

 says (' Science of Life,' p. V2,Q), " A 

 .single sentence, ' Es gibt kein 

 Werden — there is no IJecoming,' 

 sufficiently iiulicates Haller's posi- 

 tion." 



- .J. A. Thoin.^on in article " Em- 

 bryolog\'" (' Encv. Brit.,' 9th ed , 

 p. 16f.r 



=' The work of von Baer (1792- 

 1876) remained for a long time un- 



unrecognised outside 



known and 



of Cerinany. Huxley made him 

 known in this country by trans- 

 lating extracts from his principal 

 writings for Taylor's ' Scientific 

 Memoirs' in 18,o3, nearly thirty 

 years after von Baer had begun the 

 brilliant .scries of his researches. It 

 can be said of him that he, even 

 more than his forermniers, Pander 

 and Dijllinger, withdrew natural 



