92 THE HISTORY OF CREATION. 
theory that all “the more perfect organic natures,” that is 
all Vertebrate animals, are descended from one common 
prototype, that they have arisen from it by propagation 
(Inheritance) and transformation (Adaptation), may be 
distinctly inferred. But it is especially interesting to 
observe that Goethe admits no exceptional position for man, 
but rather expressly includes him in the tribe of the other 
Vertebrate animals. The most important special inference 
of the Doctrine of Filiation, that man is descended from 
other Vertebrate animals, may here be recognized in the 
germ? 
This exceedingly important fundamental idea is expressed 
by Goethe still more clearly in another passage (1807), in 
the following words :—“ If we consider plants and animals in 
their most imperfect condition, they can scarcely be distin- 
euished. But this much we can say, that the creatures 
which by degrees emerge as plants and animals out of a 
common phase, where they are barely distinguishable, arrive 
at perfection in two opposite directions ; so that the plant in 
the end reaches its highest glory in the tree, which is 
immovable and stiff, the animal in man, who possesses 
the greatest elasticity and freedom.” This remarkable 
passage not only indicates most explicitly the genealogical 
relationship between the vegetable and animal kingdoms, 
but contains the germ of the monophyletic hypothesis of 
descent, the importance of which I shall have to explain 
hereafter. (Compare Chapter XVI. and the Pedigree, vol. ii. 
pp. 74, 75.) 
At the time when Goethe in this way sketched the 
fundamental features of the Theory of Descent, another 
German philosopher, Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus, of 
