ts which comes very near to the evolution {35} theory, and in his
cosmogony traces all organisms to a protoplasm in such a way as to bring
him in this respect also very near to Darwinism. Goethe, in his
metamorphosis of plants, develops ideas in which, in all seriousness, he
makes a concrete application of his thought of a prototype to the leaf of a
plant; and proved for zooelogy the fruitfulness of his idea of a type by his
well known discovery of the mid-jaw bone in man. Although Oscar Schmidt
seems to be decidedly right in supposing, in opposition to Ernst Haeckel,
that Goethe did not intend to have his idea of unity and development taken
in a real but in an ideal sense, and hence could not be called a direct
representative of the evolution theory, still he is all the more decidedly
a predecessor of that theory in directing attention to the unity in plan
and metamorphosis of plants and animals. Louis Agassiz, who, on the other
hand, continued up to his death in opposition to the entire doctrine of
descent, made the idea of _types_ the principle of his whole
classification, and said: "Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal
creation tends from the first appearance of the first paleozoic fish."
Richard Owen, who rejected the selection theory and favored that of
descent, published, long before Darwin's appearance, some most interesting
results of his anatomical and palaeontological investigations from the point
of view of the prototype and its modifications. "Man, from the beginning of
organisms, was ideally present upon the earth," is a sentence which we
quote from Owen's works.

In short, this ideal momentum in the observation of the organic kingdoms is
not only the most beautiful blossom and the ripest fruit of the union
between {36} laborious and comprehensive detailed investigations and a
generalizing philosophic penetration, but it was also a very efficient
preparation of the mind for the evolution problem, so far as the summing up
of the organisms under a type and plan is only the ideal reverse of its
realistic reduction to a common pedigree.

We have yet to add the investigations in regard to the history of evolution
of the single organisms, as well as those in comparative anatomy, which in
former centuries were begun by scientists like Swammerdam and Boerhave and
carried more nearly to completion by K. E. von Baer, Carus, and others. In
reducing all the tissues of plants and animals to one cell, and tra