194 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. {Vo XXXIII. 
very largely in the observational stage, and was ancillary to 
medicine. In the mean time, however, investigations were pro- 
ceeding in allied branches of biological science, which were 
destined eventually to place anatomy in the category of the 
sciences. 
In Germany, Johannes Miiller and Meckel; in England, 
Hunter, Home and, later, Owen; and in France, Vicq d’Azyr, 
Etienne, and Isidore Geoffroi St. Hilaire, Lamarck and, espe- 
cially, Cuvier, prosecuted with vigor and enthusiasm the study 
of comparative anatomy, the results of their observations 
calling into existence two diametrically opposed deductions, 
on the one hand the doctrine of Types espoused by Cuvier, 
and on the other that of Transformationism, upheld by Etienne 
Geoffroi St. Hilaire and Lamarck. Cuvier’s theory, briefly 
stated, was that in the animal world there was a definite 
number of structural types or plans, to one or other of which 
every animal could be referred. The theological bias of the 
theory was strong; the plans or types, having existed in the 
mind of the Creator from the beginning, were fixed and immu- 
table; connecting links between them were impossible; they were 
circles whose boundaries might touch but could never overlap. 
And, furthermore, the theory involved the idea of a special 
creation for each species, the species being consequently as 
immutable as the types. Man, therefore, was structurally iso- 
lated, and the similarities known to exist between him and lower 
forms could have no significance. 
To Lamarck and St. Hilaire the facts of comparative anatomy 
pointed to entirely different conclusions. To them there was 
a fundamental unity in the animal kingdom; as some one has 
said, they took a synthetic, and Cuvier an analytic, view of 
nature. This unity was possible only by an absence of a fixity 
of type, by a mutability of species, and these were the ideas 
they opposed to Cuvier’s scheme of creation, the ideas of trans- 
formationism or evolution practically as we now understand it. 
The controversy between the two schools was prolonged and 
bitter, and culminated in the celebrated passage of arms before 
the Academy of Sciences in Paris, which, to Goethe, seemed 
more important than the victories of Napoleon. The enormous 
