CHAPTER 6 considers Wolff's teratological work, 

 performed after his move to Russia and based on the 

 St. Petersburg collections in the Kunstkamera. These 

 studies, published in Latin, have remained essentially 

 unknown until recently. After arguing that God would not 

 have created monsters, Wolff maintained that abnormalities 

 must occur by epigenesis rather than preformation. Blyakher 

 asserts that Wolff's discussion of God reflected his desire 

 to "eliminate God from nature" and that any impression 

 otherwise stems from Wolff's necessary conformity to 

 prevailing popular opinion. But the reader should consider 

 this claim sceptically, a warning reinforced by awareness 

 of Blyakher 's efforts through the last few pages of the 

 chapter to make Wolff a predecessor of modern embryology. 



CHAPTER 7 presents Wolff's "essential power" as 

 discussed in his commentary for the 1782 St. Petersburg 

 Academy of Science prize competition for understanding 

 nutritional power. In a paper of his own, Wolff responded 

 to papers by Blumenbach and Born by discussing attractive 

 and repulsive forces and the importance of forces as well 

 as structure for organic animal development. 



CHAPTER 8 addresses evaluation of Wolff's work by 

 Kirchhoff (Wolff brought development from mystery to a science 

 by establishing that organic life follows laws) and Raikov 

 (Wolff was a materialist and denied the existence of Stahl's 

 mystical "soul," an idealist but not a vitalist, stressing 

 the primacy of material over soul) . Interestingly, given 

 his retrospective tendencies elsewhere, Blyakher believes 

 that Raikov distorts the proper historical perspective, and 

 he sees Wolff as fluctuating between materialism and idealism. 

 Consistently, Blyakher tries to show how major figures were 

 predecessors of modern science even though they were side- 

 tracked by errors of their day. Thus he is Whiggish in his 

 history, but he is not completely ahistorical. It is not 

 Wolff's fault that he could not do more, Blyakher apologizes; 

 the backward times slowed Wolff's progress in Blyakher 's 

 assessment. Thus, like earlier chapters, this chapter begins 

 with useful description and references to relatively little- 

 known material and ends with a claim for Russian priority. 



CHAPTER 9 argues that Wolff was essentially ignored 

 but that Russian embryologists nonetheless began to accept 



8 



