ABSTRACT
The opinion is generally held that the natural objects which surround people may, in the first place, be divided into two great and quite different groups–the animate and inanimate. The animate, again, are divided into the so-called animals and the plants, and these are treated as separate branches of natural science. The organisms, it is true, are thoroughly dependent for their existence on the chemico-physical powers and the inorganic materials, but their relation to these is so regulated that they utilize and profit by influences and effects as are consistent with their own maintenance. Consequently the testing of the connection of the greater systematic groups among themselves is of fundamental importance for the evolution question, since for the first time a genetic connection is not from the outset excluded. Suppositions might be permissible if the evolution for similarly varied animal groups were demonstrated or at least were shown to be very probable.
