The Evolution of Man

by Ernst Haeckel

Embryology made scarcely any advance in the first half of the eighteenth century, when the systematic natural history of plants and animals received so great an impulse through the publication of Linné’s famous Systema Naturæ. Not until 1759 did the genius arise who was to give it an entirely new character, Caspar Friedrich Wolff. Until then embryology had been occupied almost exclusively in unfortunate and misleading efforts to build up theories on the imperfect empirical material then available.

The theory which then prevailed, and remained in favour throughout nearly the whole of the eighteenth century, was commonly called at that time “the evolution theory”; it is better to describe it as “the preformation theory.”[^[6]] Its chief point is this: There is no new formation of structures in the embryonic development of any organism, animal or plant, or even of man; there is only a growth, or unfolding, of parts which have been constructed or pre-formed from all eternity, though on a very small scale and closely packed together. Hence, every living germ contains all the organs and parts of the body, in the form and arrangement they will present later, already within it, and thus the whole embryological process is merely an evolution in the literal sense of the word, or an unfolding, of parts that were pre-formed and folded up in it. So, for instance, we find in the hen’s egg not merely a simple cell, that divides and subdivides and forms germinal layers, and at last, after all kinds of variation and cleavage and reconstruction, brings forth the body of the chick; but there is in every egg from the first a complete chicken, with all its parts made and neatly packed. These parts are so small or so transparent that the microscope cannot detect them. In the hatching, these parts merely grow larger, and spread out in the normal way.

[6] This theory is usually known as the “evolution theory” in Germany, in contradistinction to the “epigenesis theory.” But as it is the latter that is called the “evolution theory” in England, France, and Italy, and “evolution” and “epigenesis” are taken to be synonymous, it seems better to call the first the “pre-formation theory.”

When this theory is consistently developed it becomes a “scatulation theory.”[^[7]] According to its teaching, there was made in the beginning one couple or one individual of each species of animal or plant; but this one individual contained the germs of all the other individuals of the same species who should ever come to life. As the age of the earth was generally believed at that time to be fixed by the Bible at 5000 or 6000 years, it seemed possible to calculate how many individuals of each species had lived in the period, and so had been packed inside the first being that was created. The theory was consistently extended to man, and it was affirmed that our common parent Eve had had stored in her ovary the germs of all the children of men.

[7] “Packing theory” would be the literal translation. Scatula is the Latin for a case or box.—Translator.

The theory at first took the form of a belief that it was the females who were thus encased in the first being. One couple of each species was created, but the female contained in her ovary all the future individuals of the species, of either sex. However, this had to be altered when the Dutch microscopist, Leeuwenhoek, discovered the male spermatozoa in 1690, and showed that an immense number of these extremely fine and mobile thread-like beings exist in the male sperm (this will be explained in Chapter VII). This astonishing discovery was further advanced when it was proved that these living bodies, swimming about in the seminal fluid, were real animalcules, and, in fact, were the pre-formed germs of the future generation. When the male and female procreative elements came together at conception, these thread-like spermatozoa (“seed-animals”) were supposed to penetrate into the fertile body of the ovum and begin to develop there, as the plant seed does in the fruitful earth. Hence, every spermatozoon was regarded as a homunculus, a tiny complete man; all the parts were believed to be pre-formed in it, and merely grew larger when it reached its proper medium in the female ovum. This theory, also, was consistently developed in the sense that in each of these thread-like bodies the whole of its posterity was supposed to be present in the minutest form. Adam’s sexual glands were thought to have contained the germs of the whole of humanity.

This “theory of male scatulation” found itself at once in keen opposition to the prevailing “female” theory. The two rival theories at once opened a very lively campaign, and the physiologists of the eighteenth century were divided into two great camps—the Animalculists and the Ovulists—which fought vigorously. The animalculists held that the spermatozoa were the true germs, and appealed to the lively movements and the structure of these bodies. The opposing party of the Ovulists, who clung to the older “evolution theory,” affirmed that the ovum is the real germ, and that the spermatozoa merely stimulate it at conception to begin its growth; all the future generations are stored in the ovum. This view was held by the great majority of the biologists of the eighteenth century, in spite of the fact that Wolff proved it in 1759 to be without foundation. It owed its prestige chiefly to the circumstance that the most weighty authorities in the biology and philosophy of the day decided in favour of it, especially Haller, Bonnet, and Leibnitz.

Albrecht Haller, professor at Göttingen, who is often called the father of physiology, was a man of wide and varied learning, but he does not occupy a very high position in regard to insight into natural phenomena. He made a vigorous defence of the “evolutionary theory” in his famous work, Elementa physiologiae, affirming: “There is no such thing as formation (nulla est epigenesis). No part of the animal frame is made before another; all were made together.” He thus denied that there was any evolution in the proper sense of the word, and even went so far as to say that the beard existed in the new-born child and the antlers in the hornless fawn; all the parts were there in advance, and were merely hidden from the eye of man for the time being. Haller even calculated the number of human beings that God must have created on the sixth day and stored away in Eve’s ovary. He put the number at 200,000 millions, assuming the age of the world to be 6000 years, the average age of a human being to be thirty years, and the population of the world at that time to be 1000 millions. And the famous Haller maintained all this nonsense, in spite of its ridiculous consequences, even after Wolff had discovered the real course of embryonic development and established it by direct observation!

Among the philosophers of the time the distinguished Leibnitz was the chief defender of the “preformation theory,” and by his authority and literary prestige won many adherents to it. Supported by his system of monads, according to which body and soul are united in inseparable association and by their union form the individual, or the “monad,” Leibnitz consistently extended the “scatulation theory” to the soul, and held that this was no more evolved than the body. He says, for instance, in his Théodicée: “I mean that these souls, which one day are to be the souls of men, are present in the seed, like those of other species; in such wise that they existed in our ancestors as far back as Adam, or from the beginning of the world, in the forms of organised bodies.”

The theory seemed to receive considerable support from the observations of one of its most zealous supporters, Bonnet. In 1745 he discovered, in the plant-louse, a case of parthenogenesis, or virgin-birth, an interesting form of reproduction that has lately been found by Siebold and others among various classes of the articulata, especially crustacea and insects. Among these and other animals of certain lower species the female may reproduce for several generations without having been fertilised by the male. These ova that do not need fertilisation are called “false ova,” pseudova or spores. Bonnet saw that a female plant-louse, which he had kept in cloistral isolation, and rigidly removed from contact with males, had on the eleventh day (after forming a new skin for the fourth time) a living daughter, and during the next twenty days ninety-four other daughters; and that all of them went on to reproduce in the same way without any contact with males. It seemed as if this furnished an irrefutable proof of the truth of the scatulation theory, as it was held by the Ovulists; it is not surprising to find that the theory then secured general acceptance.