folio, pp. xxxvii + 195, 12 plates,
Berlin, 1850-1855.

CHAPTER XIII

THE RELATION OF LAMARCK AND DARWIN TO MORPHOLOGY.

It is a remarkable fact that morphology took but a very little part in
the formation of evolution-theory. When one remembers what powerful
arguments for evolution can be drawn from such facts as the unity of
plan and composition and the law of parallelism, one is astonished to
find that it was not the morphologists at all who founded the theory of
evolution.

It is true that the noticeable resemblances of animals to one another,
the possibility of arranging them in a system, the vague perception of
an all-pervading plan of structure, did suggest to many minds the
thought that systematic affinities might be due to blood-relationship.
Thus Leibniz considered that the cat tribe might possibly be descended
from a common ancestor,[333] and another great philosopher, Immanuel Kant,
was led by his perception of the unity of type to suggest as possible
the derivation of the whole organic realm from one parent form, or even
ultimately from inorganic matter. In the course of his masterly
discussion of mechanism and teleology,[334] he writes, "The agreement of
so many genera of animals in a certain common schema, which appears to
be fundamental not only in the structure of their bones, but also in the
disposition of their remaining parts--so that with an admirable
simplicity of original outline, a great variety of species has been
produced by the shortening of one member and the lengthening of another,
the involution of this part and the evolution of that--allows a ray of
hope, however faint, to penetrate into our minds, that here something
may be accomplished by the aid of the principle of the mechanism of
Nature (without which there can be no natural science in general). This
analogy of forms, which with all their differences seem to have been
produced according to a common original type, strengthens our suspicions
of an actual relationship between them in their production from a common
parent, through the gradual approximation of one animal-genus to
another--from those in which the principle of purposes seems to be best
authenticated, _i.e._, from man down to the polype, and again from this
down to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest stage of Nature
noticeable by us, viz., to crude matter."[335]

So, too, Buffon's evolutionism was suggested by his study of the
structural affinitie