PRE-BUFFONIAN AND GERMAN EVOLUTION. 71 



For information concerning the earliest German 

 writers on evolution, I turn to Professor Haeckel's 

 ' History of Creation,' and find Goethe's name to head 

 the list. I do not gather, however, that Goethe added 

 much to the ideas which Buffon had already made suffi- 

 ciently familiar. Professor Haeckel does not seem to 

 be aware of Buffon's work, and quotes Goethe as 

 making an original discovery when he writes, in the 

 year 1796 : — " Thus much then we have gained, that 

 we may assert without hesitation that all the more 

 perfect organic natures, such as fishes, amphibious 

 animals, birds, mammals, and man at the head of the 

 last, were all formed upon one original type, which 

 only varies more or less in parts which were none the 

 less permanent, and still daily changes and modifies its 

 form by propagation." * But these, as we shall see, are 

 almost Buflbn's own words — words too that Buffon 

 insisted on for many years. Again Professor Haeckel 

 quotes Goethe as writing in the year 1807 : — 



"If we consider plants and animals in their most 

 imperfect condition, they can hardly be distinguished." 

 This, however, had long been insisted upon by Bonnet 

 and Dr. Erasmus Darwin, the first of whom was a natu- 

 ralist of world-wide fame, while the ' Zoonomia ' of Dr. 

 Darwin had been translated into German between the 

 years 1795 and 1797, and could hardly have been un- 

 known to Goethe in 1807, who continues : " But this 

 much we may say, that the creatures which by degrees 

 emerge as plants and animals out of a common phase 

 where they are barely distinguishable, arrive at perfec- 

 tion in two opposite directions, so that the plant in the 

 • ' History of Oreution,' vol. i. p. 91. 



