limits of the recapitulation theory: carl friedrich kielmeyer's critique of the presumed...

Limits of the Recapitulation Theory: Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer's Critique of the PresumedParallelism of Earth History, Ontogeny, and the Present Order of OrganismsAuthor(s): William ColemanSource: Isis, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Sep., 1973), pp. 341-350Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/229721 .

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Limits of the Recapitulation

Theory

Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer's Critique of the Presumed Parallelism of Earth History,

Ontogeny, and the Present Order of Organisms By William Coleman*

THEORIES OF THE EARTH and conjecture regarding related changes in organisms were commonplace in the eighteenth century. While this speculation

satisfied, or appeared to satisfy, diverse needs,' it received considerable and often severe criticism. John Walker, for example, Edinburgh's preeminent geological teacher, announced circa 1780 that the "method of inquiry which all our ingenious Theorists of the Earth have pursued is certainly erroneous. They first form an hypothesis to solve the phenomena, but in fact the Phenomena are always used as a prop to the Hypothesis."2 Walker proposed that geologists postpone attempting solutions and henceforth be content simply to "establish facts."

Reservations regarding geological and biological speculation were also cast by Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer (1765-1844). His criticism of the shortcomings in evidence and argument of the several presumed parallelisms of life, parallelisms subsequently to become famous as the recapitulation theory, I shall describe in this essay. This criticism permitted advocacy only of an idealized statement of such parallelisms, since the facts of zoology and geology denied their real existence. Kielmeyer was a teacher at Stuttgart and Tiibingen of great repute and influence, including among his students Georges Cuvier and Carl von Gartner.3 He published singularly little, how-

Received June 1972: revised/accepted Oct. 1972. *Department of History, Northwestern Uni-

versity, Evanston, Illinois 60201. I am grateful to Ernst Mayr and an unnamed referee for valuable criticism and suggestions and to John Neu for bibliographical assistance.

1 The foremost ambitions of authors of theories of the earth were the delineation of a real con- cordance between geological events and assumed scriptural demands and a desire to explore the ultimate consequences of rival agencies of geological change. See Rhoda Rappaport, "Problems and Sources in the History of Geology, 1749-1810," History of Science, 1964, 3:60-77; V. A. Eyles, "The Extent of Geological Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century,

and the Methods by which it was Diffused," in Toward a History of Geology, ed. C. J. Schneer (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969), pp. 158-183.

2 John Walker, Lectures on Geology, ed. H. W. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 27.

3On Kielmeyer's thought and career, see Carl Friedrich von Martius, "Carl Friedrich Kiel- meyer," AkademischeDenkreden (Leipzig, 1866), pp. 181-209; Georg Friedrich von Jager, "Ehrengedachtniss des Konigl. wuirttembergisch- em Staatsraths von Kielmeyer," Nova Acta Acade- miae Caesarae Leopoldina-Carolinae Germanicae Naturae Curiosorum, 1845, 21, Pt. 2:XVII-XCII; Dorothea Kuhn, "Uhrwerk oder Organismus.

341



342 WILLIAM COLEMAN

ever, and has been largely forgotten by posterity. His studies in comparative anatomy, pursued with an eye to elucidating the structural bases of organic functions, earned him praise as the foremost German physiologist of the generation before Johannes Muller. He was also an able chemist and was thoroughly familiar with current developments in all aspects of natural history. Kielmeyer's learning was broad and his personal investigations apparently numerous and provocative. His objectives for science, moreover, were carefully founded on the new critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. His entire approach to the uncertain validity of speculative geology and biology was guided by the Kantian constraints imposed upon the objective value of inventions of unaided human reason.

Kielmeyer spoke of geology and biology in the distinctive context of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German reflections on world-historical development. These doctrines usually included an imaginative re-creation of the origin and history of the earth, often enunciated a tale of the parallel development of both the globe and its inhabitants, and attended particularly to the apt provisions for the prosperity of mankind to which these developments necessarily led. Johann Gottfried von Herder, for example, extended contemporary cosmogonies beyond attention to the first formation of the earth and planetary system to a wide-ranging concern for the preparation of the earth's surface as the suitable abode of man.4 Surface topography, plants, animals, man himself-all Herder regarded as determined or conditioned by the indwelling historical process of nature. His conjectures exerted a profound influence upon Kielmeyer's developing views.

Kielmeyer himself neither created a new theory of the earth nor served rewarmed an earlier set of conjectures on the subject. He did however critically assess the claims of a particular theory (itself now lost in utter obscurity), and the views expressed in this critique helpfully illuminate aspects of the history of theories of the earth in general.5 Kielmeyer explored, from the viewpoint of the historian of life, the evidential necessi- ties of such theories. Here he found no satisfaction. His inquiry is more fully appreci- ated, however, when viewed as preparation for the demonstration of what he deemed the central doctrine of philosophical natural history-the threefold parallelism of the

Karl Friedrich Kielmeyers System der organischen Krafte," Nova Acta Leopoldina, 1970, 36: 157-167. Further references are given in William Coleman, "Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer," Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner's, in press).

4This is the theme of Books 2 and 3 of Herder's Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, Erster Theil (Riga/Leipzig, 1784).

5 Kielmeyer's observations on geological questions are stated in a letter, dated TiAbingen, Nov. 25, 1804, addressed to Karl Joseph Hieronymous Windischmann, a court physician and Catholic theologian of mystical tendencies then living in Aschaffenburg, Bavaria. The MS letter is in the collections of the Wiurttembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart, and was published, under the (editor's) title of "Ideen einer Ent- wicklungsgeschichte der Erde und ihrer Organi-

sation, Schreiben an Windischmann, 1804," in [Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer] Gesammelte Schriften, ed. F. H. Holler (Berlin:F. Keiper, 1938), pp. 203-210. 1 cite this published version. Windischmann apparently had invited Kiel- meyer's opinion on a theory of the earth, presumably Windischmann's own. On this document Holler provides no information. Windischmann published much on medicine and on hotly contested theological matters. He also prepared the first German translation of the earliest extant Western cosmology, Plato's Timaeus (Hadamar, 1801), and published some Ideen zur Plhysick (Wiurzburg/Bamberg, 1805). The latter, which I have been unable to consult, may indeed contain Windischmann's geological dicta. On Windischmann see [?] Lauchert, "Karl Joseph Hieronymous Windischmann," Allgemeine deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1898), Vol. XLIII, pp. 420-422.



LIMITS OF THE RECAPITULATION THEORY 343

history of the earth, the existing pattern of mature organisms, and the stages of embryonic development. The clear and forceful enunciation of this doctrine, as well as the specification of necessary doubts regarding its essential veracity, was due largely to Kielmeyer. Through the advocacy of subsequent German anatomists and naturalists his message, now purged of its negative conclusions, was carried to Louis Agassiz and then Ernst Haeckel, in whose hands but with rival intentions it became a constituent element of nineteenth-century biological thought.

At the outset of his comments Kielmeyer assured his correspondent, K. J. H. Windischmann, that "Of course, the idea of a closely allied developmental history of the earth and that of the sequence of organic bodies, by which a reciprocal explanation for each should be found, seems to me worthy of approbation."6 The soundness of this "idea" of a common developmental path was ultimately to be assured by the action of a common developmental force (see below). But first it was essential to identify the several parallel strands which made up the common historical experience. Com- parison of various Organisationen revealed a "certain regularity of gradation" in form (Bildung), and this regularity betrayed a "similarity with the developmental stages of an individual Organisation."7 Already in the Rede of 1793, his one influential publica- tion and a crucial text in the articulation of the embryologists' recapitulation hypothesis, Kielmeyer had proclaimed this double parallelism.8 He now (1804) made ex- plicit what had only been implied in 1793: that the (1) developmental history of the earth (and presumably the intimately related developmental history of past organisms), the (2) relations of living Organisationen, and the (3) sequence of embryonic states must all be "joined in perfect continuity."9 This statement nonetheless expressed only a leading "idea," an inner aspiration shared by Windischmann and Kielmeyer. The latter now demanded that this beguiling notion be demonstrated by means of ample and reliable evidence.

Alas, he wrote, "I doubt the possibility of re-creating such a history."''0 Kielmeyer cast doubt particularly on time past. At issue with Windischmann was not the pur- ported parallel between the sequence of Organisationen, the great array of existing, fully formed creatures, and that of the full sweep of ontogeny, the stages of embryonic

6 Kielmeyer, "Ideen an Windischmann," p. 205.

7Ibid., p. 206. Kielmeyer's fundamental allegiance to Kraft directed his attention to its essential biological manifestation-the production of organic form. That production demanded a dynamic explanation and generated genuine "organisation," the very essence of living beings: hence the various forms of living beings Kielmeyer designated Organisationen, the conventional expression "species" conveying the static view of the systematist.

8 Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, "Ueber die Verhaltnisse der organischen Krafte unter einander in der Reihe der verschiedenen Organi- sationen, die Geseze und folgen dieser Ver- haltnisse [1 793]," Sudhoffs Archiv fur Geschichte der Medizin under der Naturwissenschaften, 1930, 23:261.

9 Kielmeyer, "Ideen an Windischmann," p.

206. The sought-after parallelisms were really fourfold, the fourth series being perhaps the fiundamental term of the entire exercise. Medical authors in particular suggested that the life cycle of man provided this fourth and irreducible standard for the developmental potentialities of observed phenomena; Kielmeyer in his remarks to Windischmann does not explore the analogy of the human cycle with the other series. See Owsei Temkin, "German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1950, 24:227-246. The historical parallelism is explored in its relation to uniformitarianism and evolutionary theory by R. Hooykaas, "The Parallel between the History of the Earth and the History of the Animal World," Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences, 1957, 10:3-18.




344 WILLIAM COLEMAN

development; this twofold parallelism apparently neither questioned. Their dis- agreement concerned the parallel between these two congruent series and a third series of organisms, the putative concomitant of the earth's history.

Kielmeyer's reservations stemmed from his demand that definite agreement between equivalent points in each of the parallel series must be established. This demand could not be satisfied. There were gaps, truly unfillable voids, in the series. But in which series? Kielmeyer's reference was not to the fossil record but first of all to the grand array of presently existing forms. A "goodly number of members [have] disappeared from the sequence of Organisationen," he reported.11 Thus, no systematist's arrange- ment, however ingenious, could dispose in a uniform sequence that great diversity of fully formed organisms which daily confronted the naturalist. Scrutiny of the stages of embryonic development amongst this same welter of organisms revealed, again, "no continuous sequence." Between the floral elements and the stem of the developing plant, for example, appeared uncrossable gaps (Intervalle) in the ontogenetic process which necessarily, in Kielmeyer's opinion, destroyed the continuity of that process. As the consequence of these (and presumably other) observed facts he con- cluded that neither the sequence of Organisationen nor that of individual development was or could be supposed to be complete. Most importantly, these series offered no useful "reflection of a formerly existing" sequence.'2

Kielmeyer's quest for evidence was directed entirely at living organisms. They were to offer the measure against which the supposed continuity of the developmental stages of life in conjunction with the earth's evolution was to be assessed. And now the standard itself-namely, the hypothesized dual sequence of Organisationen and embryos-was found imperfect. Present patterns thus furnished a treacherous guide to patterns of the past.

Kielmeyer evinced no inclination to pursue the past on its own terms, that is, by means of stratigraphy and paleontology.'3 Given his premises, there was no need for him to have done so, for if the threefold parallelism were real and not merely ideal, the facts, in whatever series they be found, would be determinative for all other series. If, however, and this was the principal bearing of his argument, the several parallels were essentially idealistic conclusions drawn from the fundamental postulate of the unity of all natural processes, mere missing facts, especially in the absence of contradictory facts, could not alone destroy the general scheme. And so Kielmeyer

"Ibid. 12Ibid.

13 Kielmeyer's knowledge of fossil organic remains was presumably as extensive as limited contemporary knowledge allowed. He apparently lectured extensively on geological issues, including the interpretation of fossils and the theory of the earth, at Tilbingen in 1805-1806 (Jager, "Ehrengedachtniss," p. L). He published nothing on this subject. Leading theorists of the earth had expressly disclaimed interest in fossil organic materials: said James Hutton in 1770, "being neither botanist nor zoologist in particular, I never considered the different kinds of figured bodies, found in strata, further than to

distinguish betwixt animal and vegetable, sea and land objects; the mineralisation of these objects being more the subject of my pursuit" (cited in Eyles, "Extent of Geological Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century," Toward a History of Geology, ed. Schneer, p. 171), and Abraham Gottlob Werner, more critical than is customarily allowed, remarked that, of the factual "knowledge of the earth," "correct mineralogical- geographical observations" are most to be desired (cited in Hans Baumgartel, "Alexander von Humboldt: Remarks on the Meaning of Hypothesis in His Geological Researches," ibid., p. 25). Fossil organic remains were not an essential element in Werner's new system of geognosy.




placed a crucial albeit obvious stricture on Windischmann's and, by easy extension, other theories of the earth. It recalls Walker's complaint-we are too ignorant to indulge in such undertakings. We "know nothing," Kielmeyer ventured, of the sought- after third term of the threefold parallelism, that of the earth's history and of the past course of life upon the earth. We remain ignorant of the essence of the determinative force (magnetism) of this history, and we have no conception of the "law" by which this force regulates terrestrial transformations. Of the sequence of Organisationen and that of ontogeny, both of which were held to be veritable although imperfect historical series, we are still without knowledge of the "law" which regulates their varied manifestations. Consequently comparison of the several pretended parallel series is not yet possible. This was a serious liability, for Kielmeyer held comparison to be the preeminent method of the natural sciences. Only comparative analyses allowed general conclusions to be reached; comparison alone assured that agreement among dis- parate phenomena would lead to an all-embracing law of development. Kielmeyer's stricture thus stated that close agreement between the separate "laws" of the different developmental series had not yet been reached and perhaps could not be attained in the future.14

Other strictures which Kielmeyer placed on theories of the earth were diverse and, unfortunately, little developed. The production of life forms might vary. All forms of life were equally the children of time, but the manner of their production might easily have been different at different periods or even during the same period of the earth's history. Many creatures must surely have arisen from others in a manner comparable to that by which the butterfly emerges from the caterpillar or the floral parts arise from the metamorphosis of the leaf. All such productions are genuine "transformed developmental stages" (verwandelte Entwicklungszustdnde) which have become fixed as new Organisationen. Others, by contrast, are "original products of the fertile earth." Whatever be their origin it was also possible that all of these "primitive ancestors have quite died out."15 Apparent diversity is the product of all such changes. Certain other reservations Kielmeyer drew from fancy or unsupported conviction. Once again the sequence of Organisationen was disturbed, now by the possibility that organisms may be degraded from higher to lower types or even by the chance appearance on earth of extraterrestrial intruders (fremde Anktmnlinge aus einem andern Weltkorper). Finally, Kielmeyer offered the cryptic remark that not all transformations of the earth were necessarily developmental.16

These diverse reservations disclose the basic tension in Kielmeyer's thought. Capable of astonishing intellectual audacity he was no less given to scrupulous self- criticism. The inventions of the former, while willingly presented for public inspection, were always tempered by the cautions of the latter. Kielmeyer was able to show how, within the terms of his own system, previous theories of the earth lacked factual

14 Kielmeyer, "Ideen an Windischmann," pp. 208-209. Kielmeyer had entertained hopes that he might indeed establish a "law of the gradation of form and structure in the series of Organisationen" but admitted that these hopes had not attained fruition (p. 209).

15 Ibid. Kielmeyer's comment on verwandelte Entwicklungszustdnde suggests a close con-

ceptual relationship between Goethe's notion of the metamorphosis of the primordial plant elements and 1ttienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's later transmutationist hypothesis based upon alterations of organic form occurring at the embryonic level (arrets de developpement).

16 Ibid., p. 210.



346 WILLIAM COLEMAN

support and exhibited conceptual shortcomings. Yet this effort at criticism, while necessary, was but one element in his implicit objective. He hoped to include a theory of the earth as an essential component in a developmental schema of truly cosmic proportions. From the cosmos to our planetary system, from the earth and its transformations to the creation of living beings, from animals to man to that most divine of human attributes, mind-Kielmeyer sought to draw this magisterial developmental sequence into one cohesive explanatory system.

To bring unity to all human knowledge, to derive from it a unitary principle, to furnish a complete genealogy of our knowledge, to provide an ancestral table of nature herself- these [ambitions] merit full attention. 17

Kielmeyer deplored the arrogance and philosophical recklessness of contemporary Naturphilosophen. While often approximating and even appropriating their conclusions, he vigorously rejected their approach to nature. He denied categorically that the ego could create from within itself a meaningful portrait of the objective world; at every methodological turn he remained true to the critical philosophy of Kant. This, at bottom, was the meaning of his major stricture on theories of the earth. While not shy of metaphysical commitment, Kielmeyer did manifest considerably more caution than his contemporaries by seeking always to bring concrete phenomena to bear on the suggestions elicited from his premises.

Kielmeyer's criticism of Windischmann's theory of the earth evokes little recollec- tion of the geological conjecture and argument of a Buffon or a Hutton, even a de Maillet or a de La Metherie. For in truth he spoke from limited knowledge. With evident sincerity and constructive intent he dealt with the history of the earth largely without turning to geology. He did so because that history was an integral part of his broader objective. In the Rede of 1793 he had attended, in seemingly empirical manner, to the "relations of organic forces to one another" and not to the divination of the nature of the force or forces which animated living beings. He was nonetheless deeply concerned with that force and with its relation to the fundamental forces of the cosmos. One approach to the scale of organic nature-that is, the threefold series of organisms-was through the enumeration, description, and classification of past and present plants and animals and of their developmental stages. These descriptive and taxonomic efforts did not interest Kielmeyer. Another approach to nature's graded levels of being was dynamic. The scale of nature was to be seized and expounded in order to be explained, and that explanation could only be stated in terms of the historical process. Effects-the threefold parallelism of life-must be assigned causes. Here, founded on the example of Herder, was Kielmeyer's self-imposed task: to explore the forces, their unity and interactions, upon which depended the historical process.'8 He found his explanation in "force," and from his all too brief exposition of its effects we can derive the fundamental tenets of his conception of the historical process, including the history of the earth.

The argument of the Rede was built ostensibly from the vital phenomena themselves. From the facts of sensation, movement, and self-propagation Kielmeyer

17 Kielmeyer, "Uber [Kant] und die deutsche Naturphilosophie (Ein Schreiben an Cuvier)," Gesammelte Schriften, pp. 239-240.

18 Kumo Fischer, Schellings Leben, Werke und Lehre, Geschichte der neuen Philosophie, Bd. 7 (3rd ed., Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1902), p. 342.




claimed to infer a set of essential organic forces (primarily sensibility, irritability, and reproduction) whose interrelationships as these manifested themselves from the top- most (man) to the lowest (plants) forms of living creatures were to be explored. His attention was still confined to the twofold parallelism of the Organisationenreihe (the scale of existing forms of life) and of ontogenetic stages. As noted earlier, by 1804 his reticence had lessened and the views expressed to Windischmann include remarks on the role of force in the historical development of life on the earth.

Despite repeated assurance that his views represented direct inferences from phenomena, Kielmeyer did not hesitate to posit force (Kraft) as the ultimate term in the explanation of natural phenomena. His confidence in the "idea" of the identity of the various developmental series was founded on this conviction.

The ground upon which I hold this idea to be correct is that I believe that the force, by which the sequence of organic bodies was first brought forth on our earth, is, in the essentials of its being and lawful action, one and the same as the force by which still today each individual organism is conducted through its developmental stages, a sequence similar to that of the Organisationenreihe. '9

But more: "In both cases the force is the same one and is, in the latter instance, to be made analogous to magnetism." The former series consequently shares the analogy. The magnetic force in question was that of the earth. Since with all changes of the earth terrestrial magnetism is altered (in both intensity and direction), so must the effects of the magnetic force, that is, the "engendered Organisationen, the children of the earth," be altered.20 Kielmeyer thus exhibits, despite all cautions to the contrary, his allegiance to one of the central theses of the Naturphilosophen.2' Kielmeyer saw beyond an analogy between forces; he postulated an identity. The magnetic force was therefore no mere condition of phenomena; it was their authentic cause. Because that force was unitary, because it determined, at least in principle, all transformations of the surface of the earth and those of its inhabitants, and because the common exercise of force must lead to common consequences, Kielmeyer and his contemporaries felt wholly justified in positing and seeking out a multifold parallelism in the sequential changes of the earth, plants and animals and man. The base point for Kielmeyer's conception of the recapitulation of the Organisationenreihe during embryonic development is the same as that upon which was founded his view of what the history of the earth and its inhabitants must be. In all cases force and its consequences were stated as first principles of the understanding. Here, at least, the appeal to phenomena was slight. Such evidence as was presented by embryos, geology, and the relations among plants and animals was, to be sure, suggestive yet could not be decisive. The true basis of the recapitulation hypothesis in the early form given it by Kielmeyer was essentially idealistic.

Kielmeyer knew well that the desired multifold parallelism was more ideal than real, the gaps in the Organisationenreihe and embryological series being unmistakable.


20 Ibid., pp. 205-206.

21 See Fischer, Schellings Leben, pp. 332-353. The general problem of "force" and its relation

to contemporary physiological (especially in the views of Albrecht von Haller) and theological doctrines is briefly stated by Robert T. Clark, Jr., "Herder's Conception of 'Kraft,"' Publica- tions of the Modern Language Association, 1942,57:737-752.



348 WILLIAM COLEMAN

Certain of these breaks, he had suggested, might be explained by the notion that they were distinctive products of a permanent fixation of various stages in the embryonic series. Could all gaps in the Organisationenreihe be so explained? No, he had replied: they might be "original products of the fertile earth," and we have no reason to expect to be able to recapture their full ancestral history.22 Moreover, the extinction and transformation of organisms as part of the cosmic process was a very real possibility. To the matter of extinction Kielmeyer addressed brief yet important considera- tion. Organisms, he remarked, do die out (sind ausgestorben) or become extinct (Ausfallen). This language suggests that Kielmeyer, no student of fossils, entertained some idea of extinction. This was a notion, however, which he held to be of little consequence. On the one hand it was "not yet proved" and on the other there was available an alternate and preferable explanation for the disappearance of various Organisationen from the modern world: they had been transformed into new forms of life.

In what is surely one of the earliest such references Kielmeyer appealed to the newly promulgated transmutationist doctrine of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck: "as de Lamarck urges, all those things which are cited as being a case of extinction are equally ex- plicable as [the consequence] of the changed direction of the formative force which ensues upon the transformation of our earth."23 Although the respective contexts of Kielmeyer's and Lamarck's premises and conclusions were radically different, they did share a necessary conviction of the total transmutationist. "Nothing," Lamarck had stated, "remains forever in the same condition on the surface of the terrestrial globe. Everything there will, in time, undergo more or less promptly diverse mutations, and these according to the nature of the objects and circumstances."24 The possibility of incessant transformation allowed one to reject the conclusion, stated with increasing force after 1800 by paleontologists of often catastrophist persuasion, that various animals and plants had been, in Lamarck's words, "absolutely lost or destroyed." On the contrary, such losses were apparent only, and that fact both explained the evident gaps in the scale of organic creation and reassured naturalists that the fullness of creation had not been violated.25 Extinction to Lamarck implied that the ever- present adaptive mechanism of changing conditions and responding organic habitudes had failed-an implication he could not allow. To Kielmeyer extinction would introduce real, not just apparent, multiplicity into organic creation. This hypothesis violated the fundamental, idealized continuity of creation and was therefore to be rejected. The implicit antagonist of both men was probably Georges Cuvier, whose

22 Seen. 15. 23 Kielmeyer, "Ideen an Windischmann,"

p. 210. No reference to Lamarck's writings is given; Kielmeyer's information might have been obtained from a number of the French naturalist's publications. The Hydrogeologie and Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivans appeared in 1802; the Systeme des animaux sans vertebres was issued in 1801. All deal with aspects of Lamarck's transmutationist doctrine; the latter, Kielmeyer's most probable source, speaks briefly but forcefully (pp. 408-409, 411) of transformation as an alternative to extinction. J. F. Meckel (System der vergleichenden Anatomie,

Erster Theil, Halle, 1821, pp. 344-345) also sympathetically expounded Lamarck's transmutationist speculations but without reference to extinction.

24 Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, Systeme des animaux sans vertebres (Paris, 1801), p. 409. See M. J. S. Hodge, "Lamarck's Science of Living Bodies," British Journal of the History of Science, 1971, 5:323-352 and especially E. Mayr, "Lamarck Revisited," Journal of the History of Biology, 1972,5:55-94.

25 See Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 288-314.




demonstration of the fact of extinction, first announced in January of 1796, many naturalists soon came to regard as decisive.26

The rejection of extinction stands in close accord with Kielmeyer's belief in the intrinsic dynamism of matter. The force by which matter acts is no less the force which sustains matter in existence. Matter is created with complete self-sufficiency. Kielmeyer built upon the Leibnizian theory of development and Kant's claim for the end- directedness of all natural processes, particularly of those evidenced by living organisms. Crude mechanism, or worse, mere blind materialism, explained in this context nothing. All parts of the body, Kielmeyer wrote, "stand in necessary (zweckmdssige) association to one another"; every part is the "effect and the cause" of the other.27 All creatures are therefore active entities, responding ceaselessly to the stimuli of external and internal stresses. As a consequence the developmental force could pro duce a truly complete, perfectly graduated scale of beings only in that case where ambient conditions are unchanging. In the great flux which is nature, however, these ideal conditions are nonexistent. The threefold parallelism of nature was thus, again, an idealized representation of the perceived diversity of past and present worlds. Kielmeyer's views coincide with those of Lamarck regarding the consequences of the adaptive power of the organism. Both realized that the quest for a perfect gradation in nature of minerals, plants, and animals was chimerical (organisms were plastic beings which, because of their nature, bend to circumstance), while both authors also thereby preserved the rich fullness of the creation (extinction was transformation, not annihilation). 28

Kielmeyer's criticism of overly hopeful theorizing on the history of life and the earth is but one episode in the revived cosmogonic interests expressed in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Herder, Schelling, Lorenz Oken, Alexander von Humboldt, and numerous others explored and re-created the earth's history by the exercise of logical acumen and an abundance of imaginative insight. They did so, of course, with conclusions anticipating or at best coinciding with their

26 On the recognition and acceptance of the reality of extinction see W. Baron and B. Sticker, "Ansatze zur historischen Denkweise in der Naturforschung an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert. I. Die Anschauungen Johann Friedrich Blumenbachs iuber die Geschichtlich- keit der Natur" [Baron], Sudhoffs Arch., 1963, 47:19-26; John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1959), pp. 89-127; William Coleman, Georges Cuvier, Zoologist (Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 126-130, 149-150. Kielmeyer was cognizant of Cuvier's penchant for seeing only distinctions, designating the "Unter- scheidungsverm6gens Cuviers" as "vorzug- sweise charakterischen seines Geistes" and a capacity which could lead him "Aehnlichkeiten zu iubersehen oder zu verkennen." Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, "Einige Notizen iiber die Leben- sumstande und Verhaltnisse G. Cuviers, wahrend seines Aufenhaltes in der Karlsakademie und einige Jahre nach diesem," Wiirttembergische Jahrbiicher, 1843, 2:177.

27 Kielmeyer, "Geschichte und Theorie der Entwicklung," Gesammelte Schriften, p. 180. See Fischer, Schellings Leben, pp. 319-340.

28 Kielmeyer's remarks on transmutation imply necessarily neither a coherent conception of large-scale evolutionary change nor a plausible causal mechanism therefor. Kielmeyer's relation to "evolutionary" thought has not been explicitly examined (see references in n. 3 above), but illuminating examination of the context of Kielmeyer's ideas is given by studies of Herder's presumed "evolutionary" views; see Arthur 0. Lovejoy, "Herder: Progression without Transformism," in Forerunners of Darwin, 1745-1859, ed. Bentley Glass et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 207-221; Heinz Stolpe, "Herder und die Ansatze einer natur- geschichtlichen Entwicklungslehre im 18. Jahr- hundert," Neue Beitrdge zur Literatur der Aufkldrung, ed. Werner Krauss (Berlin:Ritter & Loenig, 1964), pp. 289-316, 454-468; and especially Temkin, "German Concepts of Ontogeny and History around 1800."



350 WILLIAM COLEMAN

investigations and, Humboldt excepted, with often astonishing lack of interest in or disregard for the most elementary geological learning. Kielmeyer's critical sense happily never really abandoned him, and, while obviously sympathetic to the task of recapturing the varied detail of the earth's history, he discerned and carefully em- phasized the dim prospects of the enterprise. He imposed stern limits on the useful role of theories of the earth but in so doing expressed in cogent form the inextricable relation between biology and geology with which such imaginative theories must deal. He then broadcast the dismaying fact: in a universe composed of matter which is dynamically self-sufficient, action-that is, adaptation-is the rule, and parallelisms created by the mind are necessarily denied by evidence drawn from nature. Kielmeyer surely could not have been pleased by his conclusion but nonetheless recognized its force and did not elaborate a full-blown theory of the earth or, more particularly, of related biological doctrines. Others, however, were less circumspect29 and transformed Kielmeyer's bold suggestion of a threefold parallelism of life forms into a monolithic explanation of the manifold facts of comparative anatomy, embryology, and paleontology.

29 See Louis Agassiz, An Essay on Classifica- tion (London, 1859), pp. 159-175, 178-181; Ernst Haeckel, Prinzipen der Generelle Morpho-

logie der Organismen [abridged ed. of Generelle Morphologie, 18661 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1906), pp. 386-389.



limits of the recapitulation theory: carl friedrich kielmeyer's critique of the presumed...

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