lation of
the Vertebrates," _Q.J.M.S._, xlix., pp. 403-19, 1906.
"Early Ontogenetic Phenomena in Mammals," _Q.J.M.S._,
liii., pp. 1-181, 1909.

CHAPTER XVII

THE ORGANISM AS AN HISTORICAL BEING

"Of late the attempt to arrange genealogical trees involving
hypothetical groups has come to be the subject of some ridicule, perhaps
deserved. But since this is what modern morphological criticism in great
measure aims at doing, it cannot be altogether profitless to follow this
method to its logical conclusions. That the results of such criticism
must be highly speculative, and often liable to grave error, is
evident."

The quotation is from Bateson's paper of 1886, and it is symptomatic of
the change which was soon to come over morphological thought. New
interests, new lines of work, began to usurp the place which pure
morphology had held so long.

This is accordingly a convenient stage at which to take stock of what
has gone before, to consider the relation of evolutionary morphology to
the transcendental and the Cuvierian schools of thought which preceded
it, and to make clear what new element evolution-theory added to
morphology.

The close analogy between evolutionary and transcendental morphology has
already been remarked upon and illustrated in the last three chapters.
We have seen that the coming of evolution made comparatively little
difference to pure morphology, that no new criteria of homology were
introduced, and that so far as pure morphology was concerned, evolution
might still have been conceived as an ideal process precisely as it was
by the transcendentalists. The principle of connections still remained
the guiding thread of morphological work; the search for archetypes,
whether anatomical or embryological, still continued in the same way as
before, and it was a point of subordinate importance that, under the
influence of the evolution-theory, these were considered to represent
real ancestral forms rather than purely abstract figments of the
intelligence. The law of Meckel-Serres was revived in an altered shape
as the law of the recapitulation of phylogeny by ontogeny; the natural
system of classification was passively inherited, and, by a _petitio
principii_, taken to represent the true course of evolution. It is true
that the attempt was made to substitute for the concept of homology the
purely genetic concept of homogeny, but no inkling was given of any
possible method of recogn