Species

144 Species

One year later, Hermann Schaaffhausen published an article “On the Constancy and

Transformation of Species” rebutting Unger’s ideas on the grounds they indicated

man evolved from an orangutan. However, he said in his summary that

[t]he immutability of species which most scientists regard as natural law is not

proved, for there are no definite and unchangeable characteristics of the species,

and the borderline between species and subspecies [Art and Abart] is wavering and

uncertain.^138

It appears then that in the post-Romantic period in Germany and German-

speaking countries, naturalists were not so rigid over species as was the Swiss export

to America, Agassiz. Unger’s conception appears to be an entelechical view—a spe-

cies was a type that was “in” the plant kingdom from the beginning, in the Urpflanze.

However, the stasis of the species themselves is due in Unger’s book to the generative

powers of inner forces. Mayr quotes him saying:

The lower as well as the higher taxa appear then not as an accidental aggregate, as an

arbitrary mental construct but united with each other in a genetic manner and thus

form a true intrinsic unit.^139

Finally, mention must be made of Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800–1862), who,
in his prizewinning submission to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1857 pub-
lished the Untersuchungen über die Entwicklungs-Gesetze der organischen
Welt während der Bildungs-Zeit unserer Erd-Oberfläche (Researches into the
laws of development of the organic world during the period of development of
our earth’s surface^140 ), in which he presented a tree diagram for the progres-
sive evolutionary divergence of types of animals.^141 Bronn, Nyhart tells us, was
committed to the progressionism of Oken and Lamarck, and when he supervised
the translation of Darwin’s Origin, he translated “favoured races” in the subtitle
as “vervollkommneten Rassen,” or “perfect[ed] races,” a subtlety that may have
influenced Haeckel’s later view of evolution.^142 Bronn had previously, in his 1841
Handbuch einer Geschichte der Natur, treated species as the result of acts of
special creation.
However, he appended a critical essay to chapter 15 of the Untersuchungen in
which he said that he doubted varieties would permanently branch off, and instead
he held that species were not transformed through inherited modifications but by a
law of nature, a creative force, as yet unknown.^143 Each species had its own lifespan,
and then a more perfect one replaced it.

(^138) Quoted in Temkin 1959, 342.
(^139) Mayr 1982, 391.
(^140) Bron n 1858.
(^141) Panchen 1992, 26f, Nyhart 1995, 110−116.
(^142) Junker 1991. See Gliboff 2008 for a discussion of Bronn’s reputation and interpretation of Darwin’s
theories.
(^143) Nyhart 1995, 112f. See also Junker 1991.