e shall see that the coming of evolution made
surprisingly little difference to morphology, that the same methods were
consciously or unconsciously followed, the same mental attitudes taken
up, after as before the publication of the _Origin of Species_.

Darwin himself was not a professional morphologist; the conversion of
morphology to evolutionary ideas was carried out principally by his
followers, Ernst Haeckel and Carl Gegenbaur in Germany, Huxley,
Lankester, and F. M. Balfour in England.

It was in 1866 that Haeckel's chief work appeared, a _General Morphology
of Organisms_,[366] which was intended by its author to bring all
morphology under the sway and domination of evolution.

It was a curious production, this first book of Haeckel's, and
representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought. It
was a medley of dogmatic materialism, idealistic morphology, and
evolution theory; its sources were, approximately, Buechner, Theodor
Schwann, Virchow, H. G. Bronn, and, of course, Charles Darwin.

It was scarcely modern even on its first appearance, and many regarded
it, not without reason, as a belated offshoot of _Naturphilosophie_.

Its materialism is of the most intransigent character. The form and
activities of living things are held to be merely the mechanical result
of the physical and chemical composition of their bodies. The simplest
living things, the Monera, are nothing more than homogeneous masses of
protein substance. "They live, but without organs of life; all the
phenomena of their life, nutrition and reproduction, movement and
irritability, appear here as merely the immediate outcome of formless
organic matter, itself an albumen compound" (p. 63, 1906).

Teleology, the Achilles' heel of Kant's (otherwise sound!) philosophy,
is to be regarded as a totally refuted and antiquated doctrine,
definitely put out of court by Darwinism.

Haeckel works out his materialistic philosophy of living things very
much after the fashion of Schwann. There is the same talk of cells as
organic crystals, of crystal trees, of the analogy between assimilation
by the cell and the growth of crystals in a mother liquid. Heredity and
adaptation are shown equally as well by crystals as by organisms; for
heredity, or the internal _Bildungstrieb_ (!), is the mechanical effect
of the material structure of the crystal or the germ, and adaptation, or
the external _Bildungstrieb_, is a name for the modifications induce