In the first part of our investigation, we found that the idea of the origin of the species, especially of the higher organized species, through descent from the next related lower ones, has a high degree of probability, although it is still not proven in a strictly scientific sense, and although especially the supposition of an often-separated primitive generation of single types is not excluded by that idea, and we can hardly suppose that the main types of the animal kingdom are developed out of one another. Now we are far from asking of _religion_ to decide for itself in favor of the one or the other mode of conception, or to place its influence in the one or the other balance-scale of scientific investigations. It leaves the answering of these questions exclusively to natural science, knowing beforehand that it will be able to come to an understanding with the one as well as with the other result of its investigations. But we confess frankly that it is incomparably _easier_ for us to bring the origin of the higher groups of organisms in accord with a theistic and teleological view of the world through descent than the origin of each single species of organisms through a primitive generation; and we reach this result especially by the attempt at teleologically perceiving the palaeontological remains of organic life on earth. Theism and teleology see in the origin of things a striving towards a goal, a rising from the lower to the higher, a development--it is true a development really taken only in the ideal sense of an ideal connection, of a plan; or, as K. E. v. Baer, in 1834, in his lecture on the most common law of nature in all development, expresses {260} himself, of a progressive victory of mind over matter. Such a plan and its realization we can much more easily conceive when, in the past genera which geological formations show us, a genealogical connection takes place between the preceding species and the now living species, than when each species perished and beside or after it the newly appearing species always originated out of the inorganic through primitive generation. In the first case, we see in the preceding a _real_ preparation for the following, and also easily perceive, the apparent waste of enormous periods of time for the successive processes of creation. In the second case, the coming and going of genera in innumerable thousands of years, without any exterior connection, becomes an incomprehensible problem, and the striving towards an end according to a regular plan, which we observe in the development, of the organic kingdoms on earth, disappears completely in metaphysical darkness.