ABSTRACT
In like manner, the history of the development of animals and plants, which investigates the origin of living forms, and the manifold historical changes in animal and vegetable forms, may be termed the history of the creation of organisms. When a stone is thrown into the air, and falls to earth according to definite laws, the phenomenon is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life than the growth and flowering of plants, than the perception or the formation of thought in man. The theory which, through Charles Darwin, has been placed at the head of all our knowledge of nature is usually called the Doctrine of Filiation, or the Theory of Descent. Organic natural science, or Biology, which as Zoology treats of animals, as Botany of plants, is completely reformed and founded anew by the Theory of Descent.
