Etienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire: father of "evo-devo"?

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the most important disagreement among comparative anatomists was not evolution versus "special creation" but between advocates of "transcendental morphology" and those of teleological anatomy-form versus function. In France this dichotomy was represented by the 1830-1832 public debate between Geoffroy St.-Hilaire (form) and Cuvier (function).

Homology--history of a concept.

The concept of homology is traceable to Aristotle, but Belon's comparison in 1555 of a human skeleton with that of a bird expressed it overtly. Before the late 18th century, the dominant view of the pattern of organisms was the scala naturae--even Linnaeus with his divergent hierarchical classification did not necessarily see the resulting taxonomic pattern as a natural phenomenon. The divergent hierarchy, rather than the acceptance of phylogeny, was the necessary spur to discussion of homology and the concept of analogy.