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Bible Encyclopedias
Karl Ernst von Baer
1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
or Law of corresponding stages" in the development of vertebrate embryos was exemplified in the fact recorded by him about certain specimens preserved in spirit which he had omitted to label. "I am quite unable to say to what class they belong. They may be lizards, or small birds, or very young mammalia, so complete is the similarity in the mode of formation of the head and trunk in these animals. The extremities are still absent, but even if they had existed in the earliest stage of the development we should learn nothing, because all arise from the same fundamental form." Again, in his History of Evolution he suggests, "Are not all animals, in the beginning of their development essentially alike, and is there not a primary form common to all ?" (i. p. 223). Notwithstanding this, the "telic" idea, with the archetypal theory which involved, possessed von Baer to the end of his life, and explains his inability to accept the theory of unbroken descent with modification when it was propounded by Charles Darwin and A. R. Wallace in 1858. The influence of von Baer's discoveries has been far-reaching and abiding. Not only was he the pioneer in that branch of biological science to which Francis Balfour, gathering up the labours of many fellow-workers, gave coherence in his Comparative Embryology (1881), but the impetus to T. H. Huxley's researches on the structure of the medusae came from him ( Life, i. 163), and Herbert Spencer found in von Baer's "law of development" the "law of all development" ( Essays, i. 30). In 1834 von Baer was appointed librarian of the Academy of Sciences of St Petersburg. In 1835 he published his Development of Fishes, and as the result of collection of all available information concerning the fauna and flora of the Polar regions of the empire, he was appointed leader of an Arctic expedition in 1837. The remainder of his active life was occupied in divers fields of research, geological as well as biological, an outcome of the latter being his fine monograph on the fishes of the Baltic and Caspian Seas. One of the last works from his prolific pen was an interesting autobiography published at the expense of the Esthonian nobles on the celebration of the jubilee of his doctorate in 1864. Three years afterwards he received the Copley medal. He died at Dorpat on the 28th of November 1876. (E. CL.)
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Chisholm, Hugh, General Editor. Entry for 'Karl Ernst von Baer'. 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.studylight.org/encyclopedias/eng/bri/k/karl-ernst-von-baer.html. 1910.
