racter, a pious Christian in the best sense of
the word, and an extremely conservative politician; a striking example
that these convictions can dwell side by side with the principles of
the recent doctrines of evolution in one and the same person. But in
comparison with the powerful influence of the rest of the Berlin
naturalists who, for the most part, are decided opponents of
transmutation, and who have only lately--a few of them, to follow the
fashion--become converts to it, a man like Alexander Braun could have
no effect in procuring that it should be taught.

However, this is not the first time that this very Berlin society of
learned men has set itself with remarkable firmness against the most
important advances of science. Virchow's former colleague, the
deceased Stahl, with a similar purpose and with great success,
preached this principle: "Science must turn back again." Just as at
the present day the Berlin biologists have opposed the most obstinate
and pertinacious resistance to the greatest scientific stride of this
century, so did it happen in former times with regard to other
doctrines of progress. We have only to recall Caspar Friedrich Wolff,
the great inquirer, who in 1759 first detected the nature of the
individual processes of development in the animal ovum, and founded
on it his observations in his "Theoria Generationes," which marked
an epoch in biological science. The Berlin savants, full of the
prevailing prejudices, so contrived at that time that Wolff never once
could obtain the permission which he craved, to lecture publicly, and
in consequence found himself compelled to retire to St. Petersburg for
the sake of peace. And yet in that instance there was no question
of a "theory" properly so-called. For the fundamental theory of
generation--the "theory of epigenesis"--as propounded by Wolff was
nothing more than a simple, general exposition of embryological facts
which he had been the first to recognise, and of whose truth every one
might convince himself by direct observation. In spite of this, for
another half century, the predominant error of the "Preformation-theory"
continued to be universally accepted--the ludicrous and nonsensical
doctrine, supported by the authority of Haller, that all the successive
generations of animals exist preconceived and enclosed one within the
other, and that no individual development ever takes place! _Nulla est
epigenesis!_ (Compare my "Evolution of Man," vol.