Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/42

38 genetic and the descriptive equivalent merely to the distinction between past and present. It need hardly be said that genetic inquiries in science are not necessarily purely historical or archeological inquiries, since phenomena of genesis may be recurrent phenomena, taking place in accordance with the same laws in past or present. But, though he blurred the idea somewhat, it remains true that, in his contrast between two types of scientific research, Kant exhibited his inclination to what, in the vaguer sense, may properly be described as an evolutionary habit of mind. It still remains, however, to determine just how far this carried him, when he came to the consideration of definite problems.

His problem of predilection, as I have said, was that of the nature of a "race," the relations of different races, and the causes of their diversity in physical characters. And this made necessary, at the very outset, a consideration of the nature of a "species." Here, once more, Kant follows Buffon: "Animals, however different they may be in form, belong to the same physical species if, when mated with one another, they produce fertile offspring."

These references to Naturgattungen, determined by the criterion of fertility of offspring, are themselves hardly in the language of transformism. Yet one who employed such language might still regard these "true species" as eventual results of divergent descent from common ancestors. But when we examine Kant's way of further defining these species, we find that his notion of them expressly precludes the possibility of any transformation of one into another through descent. By the Buffonian test, he says: