IV 



Darwinism, of which, he remained to the end an opponent. His 

 activity was at last broken by the increasing infirmities of old age, 

 and on the 28th November, 1876, at five in the afternoon, he passed 

 away. Only ten days before his death had he prepared for publica- 

 tion a communication to the " Archiv. fur Arithropologie." 



In 1854 he was elected a foreign member of the Society, and in 

 1867 he received the Copley medal. 



Thus, as with so many other great men, Baer's intellectual life 

 passed through two phases : an embryological phase to which the 

 strength of his manhood was devoted, and an anthropological phase 

 which absorbed the energy of his later years. ADd, as with other 

 great men, it is by virtue of the earlier phase that his name is destined 

 never to be forgotten. It is no disrespect to his later labours to say 

 that they cannot, in importance, be for one moment compared to the 

 work of those seven years which produced the " Entwickelungsge- 

 schichte." When, in 1819, Baer put his hand to the plough, sixty 

 years had passed since Wolff published his " Theoria Generationis, " and 

 during the whole of that long interval there had been no worthy em- 

 bryological work, save Pander's tract, which, though admirable, was 

 but a fragment ; the skeleton which Wolff had put together had as 

 yet to be clothed, and the views to which Wolff:' s genius had by in- 

 stinct led him, needed still to be made sure by detailed proofs. When 

 in 1828 Baer sent his sheets to the press, the story of the growth of 

 the chick was in its main features complete. The varied manifold 

 labours of embryologists since that day have filled up gaps and 

 rounded off angles in Baer's edifice, but they have hardly touched the 

 structure itself. 



But it is almost the least of Baer's merits to have made known a 

 mass of new facts touching the formation of the bird and other animals. 

 Facts were to him useless, save as bricks wherewith to build up true 

 views of nature. All through his slow toilsome study of the folds 

 and twists, the thickenings and thinnings of the growing chick, he 

 was supported by the sure hope that in the flitting shadows of em- 

 bryonic forms was to be found the key to the laws of animal organisa- 

 tion. He wrote to Pander, " Grleich einem leuchtenden Strahle schoss 

 es mir durch die Seele, dass der Typus im Bau der Wirbelthiere sich 

 allmahlig im Embryo ausbildet." It is not on account of the extent 

 and accuracy of his work, for others, such as Bathke, have been as 

 laborious and accurate, that Baer's inquiries mark an epoch. It is 

 because he was the first, if not actually to see (for Merkel had some 

 twenty years before laid hold of the same truth), at least clearly to 

 enunciate, and indeed to demonstrate, the important law that the 

 embryonic phases of the individual are tokens of the relations of kind 

 and race. 



Working as we do now in the light of the doctrine of natural selec- 



