ABSTRACT
Schaaffhausen, the anthropologist of Bonn, in an Essay “On the Permanence and Transformation of Species,” declared himself decidedly in favour of the Theory of Descent. In a lecture delivered in 1834, entitled “The Most General Laws of Nature in All Development,” he shows that only in a very childish view of nature could organic species be regarded as permanent and unchangeable types, and that in fact they can be only passing series of generations. The eminent botanist, F. Unger, of Vienna, was led by his profound and comprehensive investigations on extinct vegetable species, to a palaeontological history of the development of the vegetable kingdom, which distinctly asserts the principle of the Theory of Descent. Although Jean Lamarck was born as early as 1744, he did not begin the publication of his theory until the commencement, in 1801, and established it more fully only in 1809, in his classic “Philosophie Zoologique.”
