nceptions of Goethe and the German
transcendentalists.

[130] _Mem. Acad. Sci._, iv., pp. cclxxxiv.-ccci., 1824.

[131] _Ann. Sci. Nat._, xi., xii., 1827; xvi., 1829; xxi., 1830.

[132] See Radl, _loc. cit._, i., pp. 225-6.

[133] _Ann. Sci. nat._ (2), ii., p. 248, 1834.

[134] _Ann. Sci. nat._, iii., pp. 377-80, 1824.

[135] _Memoires sur les Animaux sans Vertebres_, Part I.,
p. 10, Paris, 1816.

[136] _Ann. Sci. Nat._, (1), i., pp. 97-135, 416-432,
1824.

[137] _Isis_, p. 456, 1820 (2).

[138] Cuvier, _Mem. Acad. Sci._, iv., p. cclxx., 1824.

[139] _Acad. Sci._ 18th Oct. 1831. Extract in _Ann. Sci.
Nat._, xxiv., pp. 254-60, 1831.

[140] His views were more fully elaborated in his _Memoire
sur la conformite organique dans l'echelle animale_,
Montpellier, 1832.

CHAPTER VII

THE GERMAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS

To complete our historical survey of the morphology of the early 19th
century we have now to turn back some way and consider the curious
development of morphological thought in Germany under the influence of
the _Philosophy of Nature_. We have already seen many of these notions
foreshadowed by Goethe, who had considerable affinity with the
transcendentalists, but the full development of transcendental habits of
thought comes a little later than the bulk of Goethe's scientific work,
and owes more to Kielmeyer and Oken than to Goethe himself.

A great wave of transcendentalism seems to have passed over biological
thought in the early 19th century, arising mainly in Germany, but
powerfully affecting, as we have seen, the thought of Geoffroy and his
followers. Many ideas were common to the French and German schools of
transcendental anatomy, the fundamental conception that there exists a
unique plan of structure, the idea of the scale of beings, the notion of
the parallelism between the development of the individual and the
evolution of the race. It is difficult to disentangle the part played by
each school and to determine which should have the credit for particular
theories and discoveries. The philosophy seems to have come chiefly from
Germany, the science from France. It must be borne in mind that German
comparative anatomy was largely derivative from French, that the Paris
Museum was the acknowledged anatomical centre, and that Cuvier was its
acknowledged head.

It is probably correct to say that the credit mainly belongs to t