One of the best known of the earlier examples of this mood is Kerner von Marilaun’s large and beautiful work on “Plant Life.”(21) He does, indeed, admit that our species are variations of antecedent forms, but only in a very limited sense. Within the stocks or grades of organisation which have always existed, variations have come about, through “hybridisation,” through the crossing of similar, but relatively different forms; these variations alter the configuration and appearance in detail, but neither affect the general character nor cause any transition from “lower” to “higher.” Kerner disposes of the chief argument in favour of the theory of descent, the homology of individual organs, by explaining that the homology is due to the similarity of function in the different organisms. A similar argument is used in regard to “ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.” Palæontology does not disclose in the plant-world any “synthetic types,” which might have been the common primitive stock from which many now divergent branches have sprung, nor does it disclose any “transition links” really intermediate, for instance, between cryptogams and gymnosperms, or between gymnosperms and angiosperms. That the higher races are apparently absent from the earlier strata is not a proof that they have never existed. The peat-bog flora must have involved the existence of a large companion-flora, without which the peat could not have been formed, but all trace of this is absent in the still persistent vestiges of these times.(22) Life, with energy and matter, has existed as a phenomenon of the universe from all eternity, and thus its chief forms and manifestations have not “arisen,” but have always been. If facts such as these contradict the Kant-Laplace theory of the universe, then the latter must be corrected in the light of them, not conversely. The extreme isolation of Kerner and his theory is probably due especially to this corollary of his views. Among the most recent examples of antagonism to the Evolution-Theory, the most interesting is a book by Fleischmann, professor of zoology in Erlangen, published in 1901, and entitled, “The Theory of Descent.” It consists of “popular lectures on the rise and decline of a scientific hypothesis” (namely, the Theory of Descent), and it is a complete recantation by a quondam Darwinian of the doctrine of his school, even of its fundamental proposition, the concept of evolution itself. For Fleischmann is not guilty, like Weismann, of the inaccuracy of using “Theory of Descent” as equivalent to Darwinism; he is absolutely indifferent to the theory of natural selection. His book keeps strictly to matters of fact, and rejects as speculation everything in the least beyond these; it does not express even an opinion on the question of the origin of species, but merely criticises and analyses.