es
in their unacquaintance with the advance of modern morphology. As has
been repeatedly stated, no natural science is so directly to be
referred to the doctrine of evolution--and more particularly to the
theory of descent--as morphology. It is because we morphologists can
neither explain nor comprehend all the manifold and infinitely complex
form-phenomena of the animal and plant worlds without this theory,
because to us transmutation contains the only possible, rational
explanation of organic types, that we all regard it as the
indispensable basis of the scientific doctrine of form, and as
demanding no further proofs of its certainty than those which now lie
in abundance before us.

Du Bois-Reymond, and still more Virchow, ignore these proofs, because
they are to a great extent ignorant alike of the inquiries and
results, of the methods and the aims of our modern morphology, and
this ignorance may be accounted for partly by the one-sided direction
which their biological studies have taken, partly by the fact that
there are few universities where the study of morphology is so
behindhand as at the University of Berlin. Fully twenty years have now
elapsed since the great Johannes Mueller died, the last naturalist who
could command all the departments of biology. The three great
provinces of science which had been reunited into a triune kingdom
under his powerful sceptre, were then divided among three professors'
chairs: Du Bois-Reymond took that of physiology, Virchow, theoretical
pathology (pathological anatomy and physiology), and the third, and
most important chair, that of morphology (human and comparative
anatomy, including the history of evolution) fell to Boguslaus
Reichert. This choice was, as is now universally admitted, an
incomprehensible mistake. Instead of calling Carl Gegenbaur, or Max
Schultze, or some one else of youthful capacity and vigour to the
chair of morphology--a science which is the first foundation of
zoology as well as of medicine--in Reichert they selected an elderly
school anatomist cramped by strong old-fashioned notions, who had done
some good and useful specialist work, but whose general views had
developed all awry, and who for the unexampled obscurity of his
conceptions and the confusion of his ideas, was outdone by none save
only Adolf Bastian. For twenty years this man has represented animal
morphology in the second university of Germany, and in these twenty
years hardly any work wor