CONCLUSION 231 



larger animal and plant divisions were brought, without 

 proof, into the area of fossil material. No wonder then 

 that palaeontology could not follow these academical 

 prescriptions, and, when it tried to do so, made a fiasco/ l 



The embryological methods of Hackel have, ac- 

 cording to Deperet, 3 led the whole of palaeontological 

 research in a wrong direction. The ' naive ' pedigrees } 

 constructed according to them ' have crumbled just as 

 speedily as they have arisen ; they cover, as with rotten 

 wood, the ground of the forest and only render more 

 difficult the progress of the future/ 3 



All the more is it to be regretted that the neo- 

 Lamarckians wish to endeavour once more to solve the 

 problem of evolution deductively, since they deduce 

 the common origin of plants, animals, and man from 

 the entirely wrong assumption of their essential equality. 

 Despite all protests there is thereby substituted another 

 ' dogma ' in the place of the Darwinian ' dogma ' as 

 they express it. The tone of their writings is also not 

 always a high-class one. The investigators who believe 

 in God are contumeliously pitied : thus A. Wagner 4 

 says of Wigand that his 'in many respects excellent 

 adverse critique of Darwinism, he has spoilt, particu- 

 larly, through the marked theistic colouring of his 

 philosophy. Like Wigand, too, did K. E. v. Baer spoil 

 the influence of his arguments by deriving from his 



1 G. Steinmann : Die geologischen Grundlagen der Abstammungslehre, 

 p. 17. 



2 Umbildung der Tierwelt, p. 113. 



3 Ibid. p. 108. 



4* Oeschichte des Lamarckismus, p. 60. 



