i 4 THE HUMAN SPECIES 



The first man in Germany to attack boldly this question 

 was no other than the great poet and thinker, Goethe, whose 

 genius gave him a deep insight into the secrets of the organic 

 world, and made him pre-eminent, even in technical matters, 

 over his contemporaries. His Metamorphosis of Plants, written 

 in 1790, was followed by Comparative Craniology, and in 1818 

 by Metamorphosis of Animals, in which work Goethe assumes 

 as the leading factors in metamorphosis an internal creative 

 force, the type, and an external creative force, or power of 

 adaptation. 



Then followed a long series of works by the German 

 naturalists C. Ernst v. Baer, Schleiden, Unger, Viktor Carus, 

 Schaaffhausen and Ludwig Biichner, and by the English 

 naturalists, Erasmus Darwin, William Herbert, Herbert Spencer 

 and Huxley. The way was thus well prepared for Charles 

 Darwin's epoch-making work on the Origin of Species by means 

 of Natural Selection (1859). Darwin adopts the theories of 

 Lamarck and St. Hilaire on the metamorphosis of organisms, 

 but his penetrating mind seeks to prove them on entirely new 

 lines, in that he assumes, as the main agents of metamorphosis, 

 inheritance, individual variation, inherited variation, the struggle 

 for existence and natural selection. His first work treats solely 

 of animal and vegetable organisms, but in his later work, On 

 the Descent of Man, he applies the same laws to the gradual 

 evolution of man from lower forms of life. In the introduction * 

 he vigorously protests against the .attacks of ignorance on 

 science. " It is those who know little, and not those who know 

 much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will 

 never be solved by science." Darwin considers that there is 

 ample justification for the conclusion that man, in common 

 with all other species, is evolved from some lower and extinct 

 form. 



It was inevitable that a member of the ape family should 

 be selected as the immediate forerunner of man, but that 

 Darwin represents one of the surviving forms of ape as the pro- 

 genitor of the human race is merely a false assertion on the 

 part of his antagonists. Unlike Lamarck, who pleads the 



1 Complete Works of Charles Darwin, from the English, by Viktor Carus, 

 Stuttgart, 1875, vol. v., p. 3. 



