8 GENESIS OF MAN 



ment and cerebral differentiation, are obviously least removed 

 from our common tertiary ancestors." 



Both in his History of Creation and in his Anthropogeny, Haeckel 

 has done a service to the cause of evolution by reviewing, in a fair 

 and disinterested manner, the history of the origin and progress of 

 those ideas which have culminated in the Darwinian theory. Let 

 us glance for a moment at this history. 



Passing over the names of Wolff, Baer, Kant, Schleiden, Oken, 

 and Humboldt, in Germany, of Buffon and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, 

 in France, and of Dean Herbert, Professor Grant, Patrick Matthew, 

 Freke, and Herbert Spencer (Essays, 1852), in England, all of 

 whom had given more or less definite expression to these pro- 

 gressive ideas prior to the appearance of the Origin of Species, it 

 may be remarked that the great conception of the natural relation- 

 ship (filiation) of all organic forms and their descent or development 

 from common ancestors that have existed in more or less remote 

 periods of the past, had a threefold independent origin in the minds 

 of three men who were contemporary at the close of the last and 

 the beginning of the present century, in each of the three great 

 nations that now lead the intellectual world. These men were 

 Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the illustrious Charles, in Eng- 

 land, Wolfgang Goethe, the great poet and philosopher, in 

 Germany, and Jean Lamarck, in France. Wholly unacquainted 

 with each other and with each other's works, these three men, 

 almost at the same time, gave utterance to substantially the same 

 fundamental ideas, and elaborated in more or less extended and 

 systematic form the essential ground-principles which now underlie 

 the edifice of all progressive biological science. 



In his Avork entitled Zo'bnomia, published in 1794, Erasmus 

 Darwin lays great weight upon the transformation of species 

 of animals and plants through their own activities of life and 

 through forced habituation to changed conditions of existence. 

 It is a current remark, as applied to Charles Darwin, that he fur- 

 nishes in himself one of the finest illustrations of " development," 

 and thus of the truth of his own theory, that can be cited. Far 

 more pointed, however, is the pleasantry of Haeckel, when, refer- 

 ring to the grandfather of Charles as entertaining the germs of his 

 grandson's philosophy, and noting the striking circumstance 

 that his father, though a respectable physician, exhibited no signs 



