chert and his colleagues, is as far behind that of
Mueller's day, twenty or thirty years ago, in all general comprehension
of the typical organism, as it is in advance of it in specialist
acquirements.

In medical, as in all other scientific learning, the highest aim does
not consist in seeking to accumulate a vast chaotic mass of isolated
items of knowledge, but in a general comprehension of the science, its
aims and problems. The teacher should, above everything, guide the
pupil to this general knowledge, and then it will be easy to him, by
the aid of proper methods, to acquire mastery in each individual and
special branch. Thus in medicine, as in every other science, he is not
the best qualified who, on Bastian's method, has loaded his memory
with a confused mass of undigested facts, and has flung them all
together into his brain without any order; but, on the contrary, he
who has practically digested a considerable number of the most
important facts, and has critically co-ordinated them to a harmonious
whole. It is precisely under this aspect that transmutation is of such
inestimable value to morphology; it enables us to rise from the bare
empirical knowledge of numberless isolated facts to a philosophical
conception of their efficient causes.

The aversion and contempt which the theories of descent and selection
have met with at Berlin, more than in any other place, is in great
measure to be explained by the circumstance that, during the last two
decades, morphological studies have been more neglected in that
university than any others. In no other city of Germany has evolution
in general, as well as Darwinism in particular, been so little valued,
so utterly misunderstood, and treated with such sovereign disdain as
in Berlin. Nay, Adolf Bastian, the most zealous of all the Berlin
opponents of our doctrines, has insisted on these facts with peculiar
satisfaction. Of all the conspicuous naturalists of Berlin only one
accepted the doctrine of transmutation from the beginning with sincere
warmth and full conviction, being, indeed, persuaded of its truth even
before Darwin himself. This was the gifted botanist Alexander Braun,
who is lately dead--a morphologist who was equally distinguished by
the extent of his comprehensive knowledge of details, as by his
philosophical mastery over them. His firm conviction of the truth of
the theory of descent is all the more remarkable because he was at the
same time a spotless cha