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Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable. In those days I had never even heard of Treviranus' 'Biologie. However, I had studied Lamarck attentively and I had read the 'Vestiges' with due care; but neither of them afforded me any good ground for changing my negative and critical attitude.
And it is hard to say whether Lamarck or Treviranus has the priority in propounding the main thesis of the doctrine of evolution; for though the first volume of Treviranus's "Biologie" appeared only in 1802, he says, in the preface to his later work, the "Erscheinungen und Gesetze des organischen Lebens," dated 1831, that he wrote the first volume of the "Biologie" "nearly five-and-thirty years ago," or about 1796.
A similar train of ideas to Lotze’s is followed to-day by O. Hertwig, especially in his “Mechanismus und Biologie.” Lighter and more elegant was the polemic against vital force, and the outline of a mechanical theory which Du Bois-Reymond prefaced to his great work, “Untersuchungen über die tierische Electricität” . It did not go nearly so deep as Lotze’s essay, but perhaps for that very reason its phrases and epigrams soon became common property.
About the same time, it occurred to Treviranus, that all those sciences which deal with living matter are essentially and fundamentally one, and ought to be treated as a whole; and, in the year 1802, he published the first volume of what he also called "Biologie." Treviranus's great merit lies in this, that he worked out his idea, and wrote the very remarkable book to which I refer.
I am far from supposing that the old Germany of Goethe and Schiller and Lessing is not still latent indeed, we know that one Professor suggested at a recent Nietzsche anniversary that the Germans should try to rise not to Supermen but to Men, and that another now lies in prison for explaining in his "Biologie des Krieges" that the real objection to war is simply that it compels men to act unlike men.
Experimental investigations and discoveries, and further reflection, resulted, in 1892, in his “Entwicklungsmechanische Studien,” and led him to insist on the need for what the title of his next year’s work calls “Biologie als selbständige Grundwissenschaft.” In this work two important points are emphasised.
Bichat assumed the existence of a special group of "physiological" sciences. Lamarck, in a work published in 1801, for the first time made use of the name "Biologie," from the two Greek words which signify a discourse upon life and living things.
About the same time it occurred to Treviranus, that all those sciences which deal with living matter are essentially and fundamentally one, and ought to be treated as a whole; and, in the year 1802, he published the first volume of what he also called "Biologie." Treviranus's great merit lies in this, that he worked out his idea, and wrote the very remarkable book to which I refer.
The first three volumes of Treviranus's "Biologie," which contain his general views of evolution, appeared between 1802 and 1805. The "Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivants," in which the outlines of Lamarck's doctrines are given, was published in 1802, but the full development of his views, in the "Philosophie Zoologique," did not take place until 1809.
In 1891 he published his “Mathematisch—mechanische Betrachtung morphologischer Probleme der Biologie,” the work in which he first touched the depths of the problem. It is directed chiefly against the merely “historical” methods in biology, used by the current schools in the form of Darwinism.
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