Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/31

 Rh suggested objections to such views, these objections were usually little regarded, and in fact reflections of this kind on the real meaning of the natural system did not often make their appearance; the most intelligent men turned away with an uncomfortable feeling from these doubts and difficulties, and preferred to devote their time and powers to the discovery of affinities in individual forms. At the same time it was well understood that the question was one which lay at the foundation of the science. At a later period the researches of Nägeli and others in morphology resulted in discoveries of the greatest importance to systematic botany, and disclosed facts which were necessarily fatal to the hypothesis, that every group in the system represents an idea in the Platonic sense; such for instance were the remarkable embryological relations, which Hofmeister discovered in 1851, between Angiosperms, Gymnosperms, Vascular Cryptogams and Muscineae; nor was it easy to reconcile the fact, that the physiologico-biological peculiarities on the one hand and the morphological and systematic characters on the other are commonly quite independent of one another, with the plan of creation as conceived by the systematists. Thus an opposition between true scientific research and the theoretical views of the systematists became more and more apparent, and no one who paid attention to both could avoid a painful feeling of uncertainty with respect to this portion of the science. This feeling was due to the dogma of the constancy of species, and to the consequent impossibility of giving a scientific definition of the idea of affinity.

This state of things finally ceased with the appearance of Darwin's first and best book on the origin of species in 1859; from a multitude of facts, some new, but most of them long well-known, he showed that the constancy of species was no longer an open question; that the doctrine was no result of exact observation, but an article of faith opposed to observation. The establishment of this truth was followed almost as a