The History of Creation Or The Development of the Earth and Its Inhabitants by the Action of Natural Causes: A Popular Exposition of the Doctrine of Evolution in General, and of that of Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck in Particular. From the 8. German Ed. of Ernst Haeckel ...

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K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, Limited, 1892

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Pagina 365 - Thus, whatever system of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in the ape series leads to one and the same result — that the structural differences which separate Man from the Gorilla and the Chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the Gorilla from the lower apes.
Pagina 28 - I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect ; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved ; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.
Pagina 474 - We should, on account of the grand proofs just enumerated, have to adopt Lamarck's Theory of Descent for the explanation of biological phenomena, even if we did not possess Darwin's Theory of Selection. The one is so completely and directly proved by the other, and established by mechanical causes, that there remains nothing to be desired. The laws of Inheritance and Adaptation are universally acknowledged physiological facts, the former traceable to propagation, the latter to the nutrition of organisms.
Pagina 33 - I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number.
Pagina 491 - But even Professor Haeckel thinks it well to guard against sending away his audience in an uncomfortable, dispirited state of mind, as might happen with such of them at least as were brought up . in old notions. He tells them that ' the Theory of Descent as applied to man opens up the most encouraging prospects for the future, and frees us from all those anxious fears which have been the scarecrows of our opponents.
Pagina 429 - ... the whole globe. It is only the Mongolian species which can at all successfully, at least in certain respects, compete with the Mediterranean. Within the tropical regions, Negroes (Sudanians and Kaffres), Nubians, and Malays are in some measure protected against the encroachments of the Indo-Germanic tribes by their being better adapted for a hot climate; the case of the arctic tribes of the polar regions is similar. But the other races, which as it is are very much diminished in number, will...
Pagina 445 - In the same way as the distances between the difierent planetary systems are not calculated by miles but by Sirius-distances, each of which comprises millions of miles, so the organic history of the earth must not be calculated by thousands of years, but by palseontological or geological periods, each of which comprises many thousands of years, and perhaps millions or milliards of thousands of years.
Pagina 493 - ... Descent as applied to man opens up the most encouraging prospects for the future, and frees us from all those anxious fears which have been the scarecrows of our opponents.' The new mechanical philosophy ' must open up a new road to moral perfection.' And his book ends with a burst of eloquence : ' The highest function of the human mind is perfect knowledge, fully developed consciousness, and the moral activity arising from it. " Know thyself ! " was the cry of the philosophers of antiquity to...
Pagina 492 - ... whether the mental and moral status of our population has not on the average been lowered, and whether the evil has not overbalanced the good. Compared with our wondrous progress in physical science and its practical applications, our system of government, of administering justice, of national education, and our whole social and moral organization, remains in a state of barbarism.

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