230 THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION 



run almost without exception parallel the lines which 

 should connect the separate families are, almost without 

 exception, broken, i.e. hypothetical. 



Conclusion. 



The period of ' fantastic evolutional histories/ as 

 Deperet 1 expresses it, or the ' methods of approximating 

 valuation/ is certainly disappearing. For true progress 

 the a priori hypotheses of Darwin and others have yielded 

 not only absolutely nothing, but done much harm. 

 Professor Steinmann expresses himself in that connec- 

 tion as follows in which bitterness is evident since 

 the current evolutional hypotheses have driven him 

 almost to c despair ' : ' When a scientific branch of such 

 predominant importance as the theory of descent gets 

 off the proper track it naturally detrimentally influences 

 all the branches of knowledge with which it is organically 

 associated. So it is also with palaeontology (and to 

 a certain extent also with geology), which, instead of 

 having an independent basis, has become a vassal of 

 the Darwinistic-Hackelistic theory of evolution. With 

 the low position in which palaeontology still remained 

 in the years 1860 and thereabouts, it became at first 

 entirely taken in tow by them ; the significance of the 

 formation of species and subjection to the struggle 

 for existence of the phylogenetic meaning of the syste- 

 matic categories of the unity of origin of the smaller and 



i Umbildung der Tierwelt, p. 143. 



