ON THK GENKTIC VIEW oK NATURE. 



321 



and plausible enough, but tliere remained the last strong- 

 hold of the older view, the existence of definite forms of 

 animal and vegetable life. Were these to be merely classi- 

 tied and reduced to separate types, as the morphological 

 view was contented to reduce them, or was the growing 

 evidence of variability to be interpreted in favour of a 

 gradual development of the higher out of the lower and 

 simpler forms of life ? Above all, how was the highest 

 type of all, man himself, to be regarded in such a com- 

 prehensive scheme of development ? In Germany many st;. 



'^ '^ . Genetic view 



great naturalists^ were quite prepared for a consistent '" 9';.""""^ 



^ x r r and trance. 



genetic or developmental view of nature ; in France at 

 that time the question was not agitated at all, the sug- 

 gestive writings of Lamarck and St Hilaire having been 



^ This does not refer to the 

 earher writings of Goethe, Oken, 

 Treviranus, and others, whose 

 merits, since the appearance of 

 the 'Origin of Species,' have been 

 variou.sly estimated by Huxley in 

 England and by Haeckel in Ger- 

 many : tlieir speculations had, with 

 the generalisations of the ' Natur- 

 philosophie,' been swept away by 

 the inductive school represented in 

 botany at that time by von Mohl, 

 Nageli, and Hofineister; in zoology 

 by the einbryological school with 

 von Baer at its head. Of W. Hof- 

 meister (1824-1877), whose labours 

 begin about ten years before the 

 appearance of Darwin's great work, 

 Julius Sachs says : " The results of 

 his ' Comparative Researches' (1849 

 and 1851) were magnificent beyond 

 all that ha.s been achieved before or 

 since in the domain of descriptive 

 botany, . . . the conception of what 

 was meant by the development of 

 a plant was completely changed, 

 . . . the reader was presented with 



VOL. 11. 



a picture of the genetic connection 

 between cryptogams and phanero- 

 gams which could not be reconciled 

 with the then reigning belief in the 

 constancy of species. . . . When, 

 eight years after Hofmeister's 

 'Comparative Researches,' Dar- 

 win's theory of descent appeared, 

 tiie affinities of the large divisions 

 of the plant-world lay so openly, so 

 deeply founded, and so clearly be- 

 fore the ej'es of students of nature, 

 that that theory had only to recog- 

 nise what had been made evident 

 in this line by genetic morph- 

 ology " (' Ge.sch. d. Botanik,' p. '215, 

 &c. ) In another direction Nageli, 

 by his mechanical theory of " the 

 growth and internal structure of 

 organisms," which he reduces to 

 " physical, chemical, and mechanical 

 processes" (1860), fell in with Dar- 

 win's attempt to " reduce the earlier 

 purely formal consideration of or- 

 ganic structures to a causal (genetic) 

 view" (ibid., p. 373). 



