Page:The Last link.djvu/115

Rh it and fought for it with ever-increasing vigour in Germany.

With marvellous vigour and quickness of perception he applied the principles of Evolution or the theory of descent to the whole organic world, and not only opened entirely new vistas for the study of morphology, but also worked them out and fixed them. He was the first to draw up pedigrees of the various larger groups of animals and plants, filling the gaps by fossils or with hypothetical forms (the necessary existence of which he arrived at by logical deductions); and thus he reconstructed the first universal pedigree, a gigantic ancestral tree, from the simple unicellular Amœba to Man. Of course these pedigrees were entirely provisional, as he himself has over and over again avowed; but they are, nevertheless, the ideal which all systematists and morphologists working upon the basis of Evolution have since been seeking to establish.

Naturally he was vigorously attacked, not