ng individuality in every
respect" (p. 263). The greatest modern treatise on embryology ends on a
splendid note. One creative thought rules all the forms of life. And
more--"It is this same thought that in cosmic space gathered the
scattered masses into spheres and bound them together in the solar
system, the same that from the weathered dust on the surface of the
metallic planets brought forth the forms of life. And this thought is
nought else but life itself, and the words and syllables in which life
expresses itself are the varied forms of the living" (p. 264).

Von Baer reminds one greatly of Cuvier. There is the same sheer
intellectual power, the same sanity of mind, the same synthetic grip.
Von Baer, like Cuvier, never forgot that he was working with living
things; he was saturated, like Cuvier, with the sense of their
functional adaptedness. In his paper on the external and internal
skeleton[177] he gives a masterly analysis of the functional modifications
of the limbs in Vertebrates, and the whole paper indeed, with its sober
attack on transcendentalism, is a vindication as much of the functional
point of view as of the importance of embryology.

Both Cuvier and von Baer, by the very sanity of their views, found
themselves in partial opposition to the theories current in their time.
Cuvier was the critic of Geoffroy and the transcendentalists, of Lamarck
and the believers in the _Echelle des etres_, evolutionary or ideal. Von
Baer also, though influenced greatly by _Naturphilosophie_, turned
against the exaggerations of the transcendental school, and by his
unanswerable criticism of the theory of parallelism took away the ground
from those who too easily believed in an historical evolution.[178]

We have seen what were von Baer's criticisms of the theory of
parallelism. If we turn to the later writings of Cuvier we find the
essential criticism expressed in similar terms. Speaking of an attempt
which had been made to show that fish were molluscs developed to a
higher degree, he wrote in 1828,[179] "Let us draw the conclusion that
even if these animals can be spoken of as ennobled molluscs, as molluscs
raised to a higher power, or if they are embryos of reptiles, the
beginnings of reptiles, this can be true of them only in an abstract and
metaphysical sense, and that even this abstract statement would be very
far from giving an accurate idea of their organisation." From the fact
that the respiratory and circulat