thought. Teleology had become a bugbear to the
vast majority of biologists, and all real understanding of the Cuvierian
attitude seems, in most cases, to have been lost, although, curiously
enough, teleological conceptions were often unconsciously introduced in
the course of discussions on the "utility" of organs in the struggle for
existence.

Evolutionary morphology, being for the most part a form of pure or
non-functional morphology, agreed then in all essential respects with
pre-evolutionary or transcendental morphology.

But it contained the germ of a new conception which threw a new light
upon the whole science of morphology. This was the conception of the
organism as an historical being.

We have seen this thought expressed with the utmost clearness by Darwin
himself (_supra_, p. 233). In his eyes the structure and activities of
the living thing were a heritage from a remote past, the organism was a
living record of the achievements of its whole ancestral line. What a
light this conception threw upon all biology! "When we no longer look at
an organic being as a savage looks at a ship as something wholly beyond
his comprehension; when we regard every production of Nature as one
which has had a long history; when we contemplate every complex
structure and instinct as the summing-up of many contrivances, each
useful to the possessor, in the same way as any great mechanical
invention is the summing-up of the labour, the experience, the reason,
and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each
organic being, how far more interesting--I speak from experience--does
the study of natural history become!" (_Origin_, 6th ed., pp. 665-6).

Sedgwick expressed the same thing from the morphological point of view
when he wrote, with reference to the ancestral significance of the
blastopore:--"If there is anything in the theory of evolution, every
change in the embryo must have had a counterpart in the history of the
race, and it is our business as morphologists to find it out" (p. 49,
1884).

By the evolution-theory the problems of form were linked indissolubly
with the problem of heredity. Unity of plan could no longer be explained
idealistically as the manifestation of Divine archetypal ideas; it had a
real historical basis, and was due to inheritance from a common
ancestor. The evolution-theory gave meaning and intelligibility to the
transcendental conception of the unity of plan; in particular it
suppli