study of human development, discussed in this part four, 

 in Konigsberg in 1834, but his move to St. Petersburg 

 that year disrupted his work and he never completed his 

 examination of human normal and abnormal development. 



Human development also forms the subject of part of 

 CHAPTER 23, which deals with Baer's teratological work 

 in St. Petersburg. Here Blyakher addresses Baer's complaints 

 about "lack of consideration or unfair attacks, with which 

 his remarkable discoveries were met in Prussia." The Russians 

 were more sympathetic, of course, according to Blyakher. 

 In part because the Germans did not fully acknowledge the 

 importance of his work, Blyakher establishes convincingly, 

 Baer returned to Russia and gave up his systematic embryo- 

 logical studies, turning instead to anthropology and other 

 scientific and family ventures. 



The few studies of fertilization and embryological 

 development which Baer did perform after his move, Blyakher 

 discusses, including several papers detailing what is 

 essentially meiosis and mitosis, according to Blyakher. 

 If fertilization and cell-division initiate development, 

 then there could be no pre-existence of individuals; the 

 unfertilized ovum must contain latent but not pre-formed 

 life, Baer had concluded in a paper of 1847. Some of 

 Baer's teratological and fertilization studies reveal that 

 Baer accepted a limited version of evolution - an evolu- 

 tion of the individual within his system of types. Blyakher 

 neatly illustrates the transition between his second and 

 third historical periods of embryology with the example of 

 St. Petersburg Academy of Science's establishment of a 

 prize for Biological Science in 1864. Kovalevsky and Mechnikov 

 won that prize, thus bridging the move from Baer's older 

 epigenetic work to the new evolutionary embryological science. 



CHAPTER 2 4 considers Baer's theoretical views, 

 including a very brief look at Baer's version of the history 

 of science. This chapter offers intriguing suggestions, but 

 most are incompletely developed and hence do not significantly 

 extend our understanding of Baer. As with the rest of the 

 book, the chief value of these lengthy chapters on Baer 

 lies in the potential of their suggestions, in the descrip- 

 tions of more well-known sources and of unfamiliar material 

 alike against a background of other familiar works. The 



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