he line at the derivation of man from apes, but they felt that if
evolution had really taken place, it must have been under the guidance
of some principle of development, that there must have been manifested
in evolution some definite and orderly tendency towards perfection.[360]

No one expressed this objection with greater force than did von Baer, in
a series of masterly essays[361] which the Darwinians, through sheer
inability to grasp his point of view, dismissed as the maunderings of
old age. In these essays von Baer pointed out the necessity for the
teleological point of view, at least as complementary to the
mechanistic. His general position is that of the "statical"
teleology--to use Driesch's term--of Kant and Cuvier. His attitude to
Darwinism is determined by his teleology. He admits, just as in 1834, a
limited amount of evolution; he criticises the evolution theory of
Darwin on the same lines exactly as forty or fifty years previously he
had criticised the recapitulation and evolution-theories of the
transcendentalists--principally on the ground that their deductions far
outrun the positive facts at their disposal. He rejects the theory of
natural selection entirely, on the ground that evolution, like
development, must have an end or purpose (_Ziel_)--"A becoming without a
purpose is in general unthinkable" (p. 231); he points out, too, the
difficulty of explaining the correlation of parts upon the Darwinian
hypothesis. His own conception of the evolutionary process is that it is
essentially _zielstrebig_ or guided by final causes, that it is a true
_evolutio_ or differentiation, just as individual development is an
orderly progress from the general to the special. He believed in
saltatory evolution, in polyphyletic descent, and in the greater
plasticity of the organism in earlier times.

The idea of saltatory evolution he took from Koelliker, who shortly after
the publication of the _Origin_ promulgated in a critical note on
Darwinism a sketch of his theory of "heterogeneous generation."[362]

Koelliker's attitude is typical of that taken up by many of the
morphologists of the day.[363] He accepts evolution completely, but
rejects Darwinism because it recognises no _Entwickelungsgesetz_, or
principle of evolution. For the Darwinian theory of evolution through
the selection of small fortuitous variations he would substitute the
theory of evolution through sudden, large variations, brought about by
the influ