ill I
!
IS LIFE AND WORK
UNIVEKSITY OF CALIFCIvwlA
LI3HAHY
DEPARSIBliv OF CIVIL ELGIl<EEuI A ;G
Gift of Llrs. Edwin d. Warner from
her husband's library.
January 1928
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
MCPARTMENT OF CtVJL
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
HAECKEL
HIS LIFE AND WORK
ERNST HAECKEL.
From the Painting by Franz von Lenbach, 1899.
(Reproduced in " Jugend.")
HAECKEL
HIS LIFE AND WORK
BY
WILHELM BOLSCHE
WITH INTRODUCTION AND SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER BY THE
TRANSLATOR,
JOSEPH McCABE
WITH THIRTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO,
PUBLISHERS
Library
(All rights reserved.)
Contents
PAGE
INTEODUCTION ..... 9
CHAPTER I
EARLY YOUTH 15
CHAPTER II
AT THE UNIVERSITY . 51
CHAPTER III
THE KADIOLARIA ... .82
CHAPTER IV
DARWIN ... . 102
CHAPTER V
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 . . . 144
7939C2
6 CONTENTS
CHAPTER VI
PAGE
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" .... 172
CHAPTER VII
GROWTH OP IDEAS ...... 252
CHAPTER VIII
THE CROWNING YEARS . 294
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 323
INDEX . 329
List of Illustrations
HAECKBL ...... Frontispiece
From the painting by Franz von Lenbach.
JENA ...... Facing p. 42
A FISHING PARTY IN HELIGOLAND IN 1865 . ,, 70
Ernst Haeckel, Anton Dohrn> Richard Greef, Max
Salverda, Pietro Marchi.
A RADIOLARIAN . . . . . ,, 94
HAECKEL ......,, 128
From the bust by G. Herold.
HAECKEL IN 1880. . . . 154
HAECKEL IN 1890 . . . 178
From a relief by Kopf.
HAECKEL'S VILLA AT JENA . ,, 216
HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT MIKLUCHO-MACLAY
AT LANZABOTE, IN THE CANARIES, 1867 . ,, 244
8 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A SIPHONOPHORE. .... Facing p. 248
HAECKEL IN 1874 . . 272
HAECKEL IN 1896 . . . . 292
From a photograph by Gabriel Max.
HAECKEL AND A GROUP OF ITALIAN PROFESSORS
AT GENOA, 1904 . 300
UNIVERSITY 1 OF
OF CIVIL
, CAUrrORNIA
Introduction
ONE of the admirable maxims that crystallises
the better sense or experience of men reminds
us that we must " say nothing but good of the
dead." Unhappily, we have taken the words of
our sage fathers in too large a sense. A feeling
has grown amongst us that we should " say
nothing good except of the dead," at least as
regards those who differ from us. So has many
a man gone from the world with little suspicion of
the appreciation that might have warmed him in
the last chill years ; many a man sunk into the
grave with the harsh echo of dishonouring words
still rumbling in his ears. It may be that our
ideas, our truths, would not suSer greatly if we
could patiently endeavour to trace the community
of humane feeling that lies beneath the wide gulfs
that often separate us intellectually from each
other.
Professor Ernst Haeckel is one of those com-
bative figures of all time who take misunder-
standing as a part of their romantic career. If he
10 INTRODUCTION
had shut himself within the laboratory, as some of
his gifted colleagues did, all the world would
honour him to-day. His vast range of biological
knowledge, almost without parallel in our specialist
days, fitted him for great scientific achievements.
His superb special contributions to biology his
studies of radiolaria, sponges, medusae, &c. give
ample evidence of it. As things are, he has, Pro-
fessor Hertwig says, " written his name in letters
of light in the history of science." He holds four
gold medals for scientific research (Cothenius,
Swammerdam, Darwin, and Challenger), four
doctorates (Berlin, Jena, Edinburgh, and Cam-
bridge), and about eighty diplomas from so many
universities and academic bodies. But he was
one of those who cannot but look out of the
windows of the laboratory. His intense idealism,
his sense of what he felt to be wrong and untrue,
inflamed by incessant travel and communion with
men, drove him into the field of battle. In the
din and roar of a great conflict his name has
passed on to a million lips and become the varied
war-cry of fiercely contending parties. A hundred
Haeckels, grotesque in their unlikeness to each
other, circulate in our midst to-day.
* The present work is a plain study of the person-
ality of Haeckel and the growth of his ideas. The
character of Haeckel was forged amid circum-
stances that have largely passed away from the
scientific world of our time. The features, even,
of the world he has worked in of recent years in
Germany are so different from our own that no
INTRODUCTION 11
Englishman can understand him without sober
study of his life. He has often been called " the
Darwin of Germany." The phrase is most mis-
leading. It suggests a comparison that is bound
to end in untruth and injustice. In the same year
that Haeckel opened his Darwinian campaign in
Germany he won the prize for the long jump a
record jump. It is the note of much in his
character. He was no quiet recluse, to shrink
from opposition and hard names, but a lusty,
healthy, impetuous, intrepid youth, even when his
hair had worn to grey. A story is told of how,
not many years ago, the Grand Duke of Weimar
playfully rallied him, in the midst of a brilliant
company, on his belief in evolution. To the horror
of the guests, he slapped the powerful noble on the
shoulder, and told him to come to Jena and see
the proofs of it. In his seventy-first year we find
him severely censuring his Emperor the emperor
of many fortresses in a public lecture at Berlin.
How his vigour and his resentment arose as
barrier after barrier was raised before him : how his
scorn of compromise was engendered and fed : how
he accumulated mountains of knowledge in obscure,
technical works before he formulated his sharp
didactic conclusions : all this is told in the following
story. For good or ill he has won an influence in
this country, and his story should be read. It
is, in itself, one of rare and varied interest, and it
is told by one of the most brilliant penmen of
modern Germany, his former pupil, now a dis-
tinguished biologist, Professor Wilhelm Bolsche.
12 INTRODUCTION
The time seems to have come in England for
the publication of some authoritative picture of
the great biologist and controversialist. One work
of his circulates by the hundred thousand amongst
us, and has had a deep and lasting influence on
the thoughts of large classes of men. His in-
fluence is hardly less in France and Italy, as well
as in Germany ; his doctrines have, in fact, been
translated into fifteen different tongues. The
deep, sometimes bitter, controversy that they have
engendered must have led to a desire to know more
of the man and his making. The attempts that
have been made here and there to " construct"
him from his ideas and literary manner are, as the
reader will see, very far removed from the reality.
Behind all the strained inferences from doctrines,
behind all the dishonouring epithets, there is a
genial, warm, deeply artistic, intensely idealist
nature, sung with enthusiasm by poets who have
known him. Once, in playful scientific mood,
Haeckel tried to explain his own character in his
familiar terms of heredity and environment. He
came of a line of lawyers, straight, orderly, inexor-
able men. He had lived and worked in quiet Jena,
in the beautiful valley of the Saale. But he did
not speak of that larger environment the field of
battle, stretching far away, beyond the calm Thu-
ringian hills, to the ends of Europe. We must
place Haeckel's ardent and high-minded nature in
that field, face to face with his opponents, if we
would understand him.
For the supplementary chapter I have drawn
INTRODUCTION 13
freely on another biographical sketch by one of
HaeckePs pupils, Dr. Breitenbach, and other sources.
For the illustrations I am indebted chiefly to
Professor Haeckel himself, and can only offer
him in return this grateful effort to lift his in-
spiring and impressive personality above the dust
and cloud of a great controversy.
JOSEPH McCABE.
CHAPTER I
EAELY YOUTH
" T AM wholly a child of the nineteenth cen-
-L tury, and with its close I would draw the
line under my life's work." Thus does Professor
Haeckel speak of himself. There is a note of
gentle resignation in the words, but the time is
coming when men will give them a different
meaning. Whatever greater achievements may
be wrought by a future generation in the service
of truth and human welfare, their work will be but
a continuation of the truth of our time, as long as
humanity breathes. On the intrepid, outstanding
figures of the nineteenth century will shine a light
that is peculiarly theirs, an illumination that men
will dwell on for ever as we look back, in
personal life, on the young days of love. It
was a strong love that brought our century to
birth.
The soul of humanity has for four centuries
been passing through a grim crisis.
Let us imagine ourselves for a moment before the
noble painting by Michael Angelo in the Sixtine
15
16 HAECKEL
Chapel at Rome. What art! What utter reve-
lation of the power of man's mind ! But, we ask,
what material did the genius of humanity choose
in those days for the manifestation of its giant
power? The last judgment: the Christ descending
at the blare of the last trumpet, to reward the
faithful and banish the sinner into everlasting
pain : the Almighty, breathing His spirit into
Adam, or mystically upbuilding Eve from the rib
of the man. There was no " symbolic " intention
in the picture; the deepest feeling of hundreds
nay, thousands of years was embodied in it.
The artist merely gave an imperishable external
form to the most treasured truth of his time.
Yet, slowly and gradually, what a mighty
change has come about!
Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a
new side of the earth lies in the violet haze of the
dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth roll
round the sun through space, by force of some
mysterious law. Kepler dreams of the world -
harmony that will replace the ever-acting Deity,
and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity
in the framework of the heavens. Galileo turns
his new optic tube to the stars, and at once the
heavens are changed, not only for the calculating,
mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense :
there are jagged peaks on the moon, satellites
circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars lying
across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings
round Saturn. Giordano Bruno shatters the
ancient crystalline vault of the firmament ; every
EARLY YOUTH 17
"fixed star" in the Milky Way is to him a
flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world,
in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb
and leap on a hundred planets. The red, mur-
derous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they
cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in
the eye and the brain of the new men that arise,
and will nevermore fade from them.
The seventeenth century, opening amid the last
glare of the martyr-fires, quickens with a vague
yearning and expectation.
In the eighteenth century the old world breaks
up. From the new stars, from the new world,
new ideas come. On all sides is the crash and
roar of conflict. Dread flames break out in the
social, moral, and aesthetic life of men. But the
century ends in the birth of a greater artist than
Michael Angelo.
Goethe, on the morn of the nineteenth century,
paints a new Sixtine Chapel in his poetry. But
he no longer depicts the old ideas. He speaks of
God-Nature. To him God is the eternal force
of the All. His thoughts turn no longer on
Creation and the Last Judgment. An eternal
evolution is the source of his inspiration. He
regards the whole universe as a single, im-
measurable revelation of spirit. But this spirit is
the rhythmic outflow of infinite developments. It
becomes Milky Way and sun and planet, blue
lotus-flowers and gay butterfly. At last it takes
the form of man, and reads the stars as an open
book. In Homer and Goethe it directs the style
2
18 HAECKEL
and the pen; in Michael Angelo and Eaphael it
guides the pencil and the brush.
All this unfolds in Goethe, as in a vision with
yet half-opened eyes.
Then the nineteenth century begins. Nature is
its salvation, the salvation of its most practical,
most real need. It must struggle for its existence,
like any other century, but it has new and
improved weapons for the struggle. All the
earlier ages were but poor blunderers. The
lightning flashed on the naked savage, and he
fell on his knees and prayed, powerless as he was.
In the eighteenth century it dawned on men's
minds that this might be some force of nature.
The nineteenth century sets its foot on the neck
of the demon of this force, presses him into its
service, plays with him. Its thoughts and words
flash along the lightning current, as if along new
nerve-tracks, that begin to circle the globe. Man
becomes lord of the earth, from the uppermost
azure down into the dark, cold abysses of the
ocean, from the icy pole to the burning tropical
desert. And at length man turns his thoughts
upon himself.
Man, his arm resting on the splendid instru-
ments of modern research, raises his hand to his
brow, and turns philosopher. He becomes at once
more bold and more modest than ever.
What Goethe had seen in vision rises before
him now in sharp, almost hard outline from his
own real life-work. He has succeeded in bringing
nature and its forces to his feet, because it was
EARLY YOUTH 19
flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. He is its
child. A thousand tongues proclaim the truth to
him, a naive, almost simple, revelation of reality.
He digs in the earth, and ancient bones and skulls
tell him vaguely of the past. Such once was he,
devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal
world. He searches his frame through and
through for further light. There is the brain,
where the thoughts crowd together. There is the
cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that
so closely resembles the lowest of all living
things, not yet distinct enough to be either
animal or plant. Here are the forms that he
successively assumes in his mother's body, before
he is born forms that can hardly be distinguished
from those of the animal at the same stage of
development. From almost divine heights he has
sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell nay,
deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled
matter of the universe.
But this early picture dissolves at once in an
ennobling and inspiring truth. Nature becomes
man. In this he presses once more to the heart
of the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang
of God-Nature. The new God pulses in every
wave of man's blood. In Michael Angelo's picture
God breathes his spirit into Adam. The new
Adam of the nineteenth century is God's spirit, in
body and soul, from the very first, for he is
Nature. He needs no more. When he looks up
to the shining stars, he looks into the eyes of God
and his own. He has come down from those stars
20 HAECKEL
like the bright dew in which they are now
mirrored. He belongs to them, but they also are
in him. All-Nature : and he is a part of Nature.
All-development : and he is a phase of the
development.
That is the great philosophical dream of the
nineteenth-century worker. His hand is black
with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the light
of the stars and of the world.
No one can understand the greatness of a man
like Ernst Haeckel who has not learned this
melody. Nature is not a flat surface : it is an
ocean. When Columbus crossed the seas in his
three frail barques long ago to seek a new world in
the distant haze, he little dreamed that the gray
waters buried other new worlds a thousand yards
beneath his keel worlds of the deep-sea, into
which our age has slowly dipped with its dredges.
So we in turn may run our eye over the blue
surface of nature, and think of its mysterious
gold-lands and spice-islands, without suspicion of
all that outspreads beneath our keel. Yet that
glorious day on which Columbus found "his
land" is an inspiration to us, his remote grand-
children. The life we are going to examine will
bring before us such a morning of discovery.
Columbus went in quest of Zipangu (as he called
Japan), and he found America. Not one of us,
however gifted he be, can be quite sure that, in
leading humanity, he is not sailing into another
such heroic error. Let us say that at once to all,
friends and opponents. America or Zipangu let
EARLY YOUTH 21
it be so. Perhaps any man might have found
Zipangu, while only the genius could reach
America.
When Gustav Freytag, who had a most happy
quality for writing memoirs, was composing his
admirable Pictures from the Past of Germany, he
sought in each period some prominent man of
plain and downright character, yet who had some-
thing typical of his age in his sentiments, as if
the time-spirit spoke through him. In this quest
he twice (in the fourth volume, for the period
from the close of the eighteenth century to the
Wars of Freedom) lit upon earlier members of
Haeckel's family. The first was Haeckel's
grandfather on the mother's side, Christoph
Sethe ; the second was his father, Councillor
Haeckel.
This simple fact shows the stuS of Haeckel's
race. The older Sethe was an important man
in his time. He left to his children manuscript
memoirs of his eventful life, which have, un-
fortunately, been only sparsely used by Freytag,
though the whole deserved to be regarded as a
source of history. The general facts in relation
to him were collected by Hermann Huffer, who
was not merely interested in the jurist because
he was one himself, but was brought into touch
with him as a result of his brilliant study of Heine.
Sethe's eldest son, Christian, the uncle of Ernst
Haeckel, is the well-known friend of Heine's youth
to whom the poet dedicated the " Fresco-sonnets "
22 HAECKEL
in his Book of Songs and wrote the finest of his
early letters. This Christian Sethe (he died on
May 31, 1857, being then Provincial Director of
Revenue at Stettin), was a lawyer, like his father,
and the father himself came of a legal family.
Haeckel's own father, moreover, the husband of
one of Christian's sisters, was a State Councillor
at the time of his death, and his elder brother
was a Provincial Councillor. Thus Haeckel's
genealogical tree spreads into the legal profession
in a curiously complex way.
We naturally reflect for a moment if we could
fancy Haeckel himself as a lawyer. It is hardly
possible. He would at least have been a very
rebellious member of the profession, and have
been sadly lacking in respect for the venerable
traditions and powdered wigs of the court
assuming, of course (which a mere layman has
no right to question), that there ought still to
be such traditions and costumes in the profession.
In his vigorous Biddle of tJie Universe he has,
from his scientific point of view, brought strictures
against the legal profession that leave nothing
to be desired in the way of candour, when we
recollect the long tradition of his family. In its
lingering in the rear of the progress of the times
the whole science of law seemed to him to be a
" riddle of the universe." The jurist is apt to be
respected as an embodiment of our highest culture.
In reality that is not the case. The distinctive
object of his concern, man and his soul, is only
superficially studied in the preparation for the law,
EARLY YOUTH 23
and so we still find amongst jurists the most
extraordinary views as to the freedom of the will,
responsibility, and so on. " Most of our legal
students pay no attention to anthropology, psy-
chology, and evolution, the first requisites for
a correct appreciation of human nature. They
4 have no time ' for it. It is unfortunately all
absorbed in a profound study of beer and wine and
the ' noble art ' of fencing ; and the rest of their
valuable time is taken up in learning some
hundreds of paragraphs from the books of law,
the knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the
jurist to fill any position whatever in the State. "
The student of psychology, however, cannot
fail to see that the disposition that led so many
members of Haeckel's family into the legal
profession was also developed in himself to some
extent. There is perhaps no other scientist of
his time with such an imperious craving for clear-
ness, for clean lines and systematic arrangement.
At least in the whole of the Darwinian period
no other has made so great an effort to convert
the scattered flight of phenomena in the realm of
life into the even course of so many fixed " laws."
In many of his writings this tendency to formulate
laws is so pronounced that the layman instinctively
has an impression of dogmatism on the part of
the author. This has been grossly misunderstood,
and made to play an important part in the con-
troversial work of his opponents. The truth is
that this sharp outlook and pronounced tendency
to formulate clear and unambiguous " laws " in
24 HAECKEL
the animal and plant worlds is a matter of tem-
perament as much as of judgment. It is very
possible that we have here an hereditary trait,
an innate aversion for disorder and confusion for
a thoughtless rushing ahead without clear ideas
and plan. The trait was the more important and
helpful as a man of Haeckel's type was sure to
be one of the most active revolutionaries in his
science, even apart from Darwinian ideas. It
would be difficult to find another reformer in any
great province of thought who, immediately after
effecting a complete overthrow of the older ideas,
has hastened so quickly to build up the new, to
devise a nomenclature and a classification down to
the smallest details, and hand on at once to his
successors a splendid order once more. Zoology,
which seemed to crumble into chaos after Darwin's
victory and the collapse of the old framework,
came out of Haeckel's hands, after barely two
years' work, in the shape of a new and graceful
Darwinistic structure not, indeed, perfect and
finally completed, but entirely habitable for the
young generation. They could add new stones
as they thought fit, or pierce new windows, and
so on ; but at all events the chaos was terminated
at a critical moment by this iron man of order.
I will only add, to complete the picture, that one
of the three doctorates that Haeckel holds to-day
is that of law (an honorary degree), in addition
to his qualifications in philosophy and medicine.
He now only lacks the theological degree, but I
fear that he will neither take the trouble to secure
EARLY YOUTH 25
it nor have it conferred on him as an honorary
distinction for his merit in that department.
The Sethes and Haeckels of the earlier gene-
ration were not merely zealous jurists, but also
characteristic figures of Napoleonic and post-
Napoleonic Prussia. Christoph Sethe, the patriarch
of the maternal line, was Privy Councillor of the
Prussian Government at Cleve at the beginning
of the last decade of the eighteenth century,
though he was then young. When the French
occupied the country he accompanied the Govern-
ment to Miinster, in 1802, which had become a
Prussian town. But the stalwart German was
pursued even there by the detested Napoleonists.
He was sent to Dusseldorf as General Procurator
in 1808, and came into dangerous conflict with
the French authorities shortly before the Emperor's
fall. The mobilisation of the troops for the cam-
paign of 1812 had led to a disturbance amongst
the workers. Sethe's sense of patriotism and
justice was affronted by the arbitrary proceedings
of the French. He was summoned to give an
account at Paris, the chief object being to retain
him the most powerful official in the Ehine
district and not a very safe man as a hostage
during the crisis. It was at Paris that he made
the finest phrase of his life. Eoederer, the
minister, tried to intimidate him with the threat
that the Emperor might have a dangerous man
like him shot at any moment. "You will have
to shoot the law first," replied Sethe. We are
often reminded of this saying in the biography
26 HAECKEL
of Sethe's grandson. If Haeckel had been burned
at the stake like Giordano Bruno, he would have
thought of nothing but the " law " the law of
truth and freedom that they would burn with him.
Christoph Sethe continued to play an impor-
tant part in the service of Prussia, to which, of
course, he returned, together with the Ehinelands,
after Napoleon's fall. He was destined to live
through the terrible reaction under Frederic
William the Third, and the fiery outburst under
his successor. After the early death of his wife
their youngest daughter, Bertha, managed his
house and large family.
She lived until her death (April 1, 1904) in
her quiet, unpretentious home in one of the large
empty streets behind the Tiergarten at Berlin,
reaching the age of ninety-two, but never losing
her freshness of mind and memory. In my many
happy talks with the aged lady the succeeding
periods seemed to melt together. The small, old
furniture and the ancient, ever-ticking clock made
me forget, in dreamy twilight hours, that the
red glare in the sky above the houses beyond, that
faintly lit up the old-time room, was the reflec-
tion from the twentieth century of the electric
flames that flashed on the great modern city.
On the table lay the latest part of Haeckel's
(her nephew) fine illustrated work for artistically
minded scientists and scientifically minded artists
the Art-forms in Nature. The dear old lady
spoke with pride of her knowledge of the " radio-
laria," the mysterious unicellular ocean-dwellers,
EARLY YOUTH 27
described in HaeckeFs splendid monograph, the
flinty shells of which are amongst the finest artistic
treasures of nature. She called them the " dear
radiolaria " with all the tenderness of the
emotional man of science who had felt a sort of
psychic relation, a living affinity, to the tiny
microscopic strangers he had been the first to
arrange and describe in their thousands. Smiling,
with quiet pride, she told me how her nephew
visited her, when he came to Berlin; how, with
the unassuming ways of this sound stock, he
chose to sleep in the clothes-drying loft ; how
he invited his friends to come and hear of his
voyages and work, bringing thirty of them to share
a single dish of herring-salad in his naive way, and
how, as they continued to pour in, he made seats
for them of boards and tubs, and fed them with his
wonderful genius for anecdote so that none went
away fasting. She dwelt with entire satisfaction on
the last, the " zoological " phase, of the Haeckel-
Sethe house. Yet it all blended softly with the
old and the past of nearly a century ago. Over
the patriarchal furniture hung the oil painting of
Christoph Sethe, with the large Koman nose
that runs through the family down to Ernst
Haeckel himself, and gives the chief feature to
his otherwise soft profile. Under a glass shade,
in the old fashion of our grandfathers that we
perhaps do not sufficiently appreciate, was a fine
bust of Schleiermacher. He was a friend of the
Sethes. Bertha Sethe was confirmed by him.
He died four days before Ernst Haeckel was
28 HAECKEL
born, on February 12, 1834. The sister came from
the grave to attend the mother of the new-born
child. A little fact of that character seems
to pour out a broad stream of light. The religious
sense was strong in the Sethes, but it was not of
the rigid conventional character. It came from
the depths of human destinies, of individual
experience. In those depths it is always found
associated with that other fundamental quality
of human experience and inner life a zeal for
the truth. Schleiermacher, the Good, had endea-
voured within the limits of his time (if not of our
time) to erect a new and firmer Christendom.
Darwinism might very well have adjusted itself to
this new Christendom, that needed no record of
miracles from disputed historical works to support
it, but sought the holiest ideal prophetically in the
symbolic conception and the development of the
true, the good, and the beautiful. Had Schleier-
macher read the Natural History of Creation, or
later theologians shared his temper, one wonders
how much exaggeration and bitterness might have
been spared on either side. But religion was not
prepared to dissociate itself from " the Church,"
and with the Church there could be no compromise.
Thus one's thoughts travelled from the radiolaria in
Haeckel's latest publication and the old bust of
Schleiermacher, which was protected by its glass
shade, in this home of old-world piety, from the
wicked flies of the twentieth century.
An elder sister of Bertha Sethe and daughter
of the old Christoph Sethe had married the much
EARLY YOUTH 29
older lawyer, Karl Haeckel, in the twenties. The
first-fruit of this marriage was Ernst HaeckeFs
elder brother, the Provincial Councillor Haeckel
who died a few years ago, a high-minded and
sensitive man. He remained throughout life
faithful to the strict traditional forms of religious
experience, in spite of all his admiration for his
gifted zoological brother.
The second and last child did not appear until
ten years later. Ernst Haeckel was born on the
16th of February, 1834, shortly after the death
of Schleiermacher, as I have explained. Most of
what I know of his earliest years was told me by
his venerable aunt Bertha.
His father died long ago, in 1871. Gustav
Freytag has pointed out how eagerly he drank
in the morning air of the dawning freedom before
1813. For many years he was at a later date
a very close friend of Gneisenau. He was an
earnest, conscientious, upright man, with no
particular artistic arabesques to his life, and at
the same time no errors. The victories of 1870
lit up the red sunset of his days. He was one of
those happy folk who thought that all was accom-
plished in the great achievements of those days,
and had little suspicion of what was still to come.
The mother survived him for many years. Her
son's Indian Travels was dedicated to her on her
eighty-fourth birthday, November 22, 1882. The
dedication ran: " Thou it was who from early
childhood fostered in me a sense for the infinite
beauties of nature : thou hast ever watched my
30 HAECKEL
changeful career with all the ceaseless care and
thought that we compress in the one phrase a
mother's love."
Ernst Haeckel was born at Potsdam, but in the
same year the father was transferred to Merseburg,
where the child was brought up. It was not his
destiny to be a child of Berlin. Saxony remained
essentially his home in many respects. We can
always see in him something of this home that looks
down on its children from its great green hills. The
cold lines of the streets of the metropolis and the
melancholy of the Brandenburg pine-forests cannot
be traced in him. In later years Berlin assumed
more and more in his thoughts the shape of an
antipodal city. His works are full of the sharpest
strictures on Berlin science. It was at an earlier
date the city of Ehrenberg and Reichert, whom
he did not love ; later it was associated with Du
Bois-Eeymond and Virchow, who gradually be-
came his bitterest opponents. But he detested
it generally as the home of Privy Councillors,
of science in the Procrustean bed of official
supervision. When he compared what he himself
had done at Jena with the slenderest possible
appliances, and what, in his judgment, had been
done by the heads of the Berlin schools in their
princely institutes, he would humorously though
it has been taken very seriously lay down the
" natural law " that the magnitude of the scientific
achievement is in inverse proportion to the size
of the scientific institute. The official people at
Berlin did not fail to make a biting retort to
EARLY YOUTH 31
these Eadical strictures that in 1881, when he
wanted to go to Ceylon, he was formally refused
assistance by the Berlin Academy from the travel-
ling-fee (then at liberty) attached to the Humboldt
foundation. He made the journey without their
assistance, and had the splendid revenge of giving
us, in the description of this very voyage, the most
brilliant account of the tropics that has appeared
in Germany since the time of Humboldt. It was
a finer contribution to the general ideal of the
Humboldt foundation than the timid payment of
a hundred pounds could have secured. However,
we are anticipating. Before that time he was to
spend a short but happy period at Berlin in the
fifties, in the best days of his youth a Berlin of
a different scientific character from the present
city, being at once less pretentious and more pro-
found, whichever the reader chooses to dwell on.
Certain traits could be recognised unmistakably
in the boy. He had a great love of nature, of
light, colour, and beauty, of flowers and trees and
butterflies, of the sun and the blue heavens.
There was also a strong sense of independence and
individuality. This did not imply that he was
lacking in gentler feeling. It is said that he would
do anything that he was asked but nothing that
it was sought to compel him to do. The little fair,
blue-eyed lad would sit quietly if they gave him a
daisy to pull to pieces. First he would, as if he
were a student analysing it, detach the white leaves
from the central yellow ground. Then he would
carefully replace them, piece by piece, round the
32 HAECKEL
yellow centre, clap his little hands and cry out,
" Now it's all right again." It is a very pretty
trait that tradition has preserved. In the play of
the child we seem to see the chief lines of the
man's character like two branches of a tree ; the
analytic work of the scientist and the recon-
structive tendency of the artist who restores the
dissected world to harmony.
His excellent training in those early years
fostered his feeling for nature and his sense of
independence with wise adaptation to the personal
character of the boy. The mother gladly culti-
vated his love of nature. On the deeper develop-
ment of his character a decisive influence was
exercised, with every regard for freedom, by a
friend of the family, the physician Basedow. His
ideal was education without compulsion, by means
of a sort of constant artificial selection and culti-
vation of the good that grew up spontaneously in
the soul of the child. The father, a great worker,
was content to give a word of praise occasionally ;
to urge him to go to the root of things always, and
never to coquet idly with his own soul. If the
young dreamer stood at the window and looked up
at the clouds, his father would pat him on the
shoulder and say, " Every minute has its value
in this world. Play or work but do something."
It was, in a sense, the voice of the restless nine-
teenth century itself that spoke. The whole life
of the youth and the man was to be an eternal
proof that he had heard the message. He has
pressed unwearyingly forward, as few other men
EARLY YOUTH 33
have done. There was ever something in him of
the mountaineer, hurrying on and watching every
hour that he may reach the summit. The day
of rest may come afterwards, down below in the
valley. In truth, it never came. It is well known
that the man wrote some of his most difficult, most
widely read, and most controverted works subse-
quently in a few months, encroaching upon his
night's rest until his health was endangered. In
a remote Cingalese village in Ceylon, where the
enervating tropical climate forces even the strongest
to indulge in the afternoon siesta, he tells himself
that, in view of the great expense of the journey,
each day is worth a five-pound note. He refuses
to sleep long hours or take the siesta, rises at five
in the morning, and uses the hottest hours of the
day, from twelve to four, for " anatomical and
microscopic work, observing and drawing, and for
packing up the material collected." He met to
the full the claim of the nineteenth century, for
all the inner poetic tendency of his character.
Such a character he must have had to become
a philosopher, as he has done ; but it lay, as it were,
in deeper recesses of his being. To the eye of the
observer he seemed to be ever rushing on with
a watch in his hand until old age. When we think
of the enormous number of problems and the vast
range of interests that brought him into the front
rank in the nineteenth century, we may say that
he advanced at a pace that would have given
concern to the aged adviser of his youth in his
small world.
3
34 HAECKEL
In the long run we may say of all education as
of the physician in the old saying, " The best doctor
is the one we don't need, because we are not
ill." Haeckel was sent to the school at Merseburg.
This instruction came to a close in his eighteenth
year. He thought of some of his old teachers
with affection forty years afterwards. On the
whole his later opinion of the usual schooling was as
severe as that of many of his contemporaries. In
his General Morphology (1866), his most profound
work, he speaks of the "very defective, perverse,
and often really mischievous instruction, by which
we are filled with absurd errors, instead of natural
truths, in our most impressionable years." Sixteen
years afterwards (in a speech delivered at Eisenach)
he hopes that the triumphant science of evolution
" will put an end to one of the greatest evils in our
present system of education that overloading of
the memory with dead material that destroys the
finest powers, and prevents the normal develop-
ment of either mind or body." u This overload-
ing," he says, "is due to the old and ineradicable
error that the excellence of education is to be
judged by the quantity of positive facts committed
to memory, instead of by the quality of the real
knowledge imparted. Hence it is especially advis-
able to make amiore careful selection of the matter
of instruction both in the higher and the elemen-
tary schools, and not to give precedence to the
faculties that burden the memory with masses of
dead facts, but to those that buildup the judgment
with the living play of the idea of evolution. Let
EARLY YOUTH 35
our tortured children learn only half what they do,
but learn it better, and the next generation will be
twice as sound as the present one in body and soul.
The reform of education, which, we trust, will be
brought about by introducing the idea of evolution,
must apply to the mathematical and scientific, as
well as the philological and historical sections,
because there is the same fault in them all, that
far too much material is injected, and far too little
attention is paid to its digestion." Seventeen
years later again, in the Hiddle of the Universe, the
elementary schools are severely handled. Science
is still the Cinderella of the code. Our teachers
regard it as their chief duty to impart " the dead
knowledge that has come down from the schools of
the Middle Ages. They give the first place to their
grammatical gymnastics, and waste time in im-
parting a * thorough knowledge ' of the classical
tongues and foreign history." There is no question
of cosmology, anthropology, or biology ; instead of
these " the memory is loaded with a mass of philo-
logical and historical facts that are quite useless
either from the theoretical or the practical point
of view." In these expressions, which recur con-
stantly throughout the whole of a thoughtful life,
we can clearly see a very intense general experience
of youth, and this is a more valuable document
than any individualised complaint against this or
that bad teacher in particular.
However, Haeckel (who, in point of fact, took
everything seriously and would have all in the
clearest order) made a very thorough appropriation
36 HAECKEL
of his Latin and Greek. When the new Dar-
winian zoology and botany needed several hundred
new Latin-Greek technical terms in after-years, he
showed himself to be an inventor of the first rank
in this department. No other scientist has made
anything like the same adroit use of the classic
vocabulary for the purposes of the new system and
created a new terminology for the entirely new
science. His creations were certainly ingenious,
and not without grace at times ; in other cases, as
was almost inevitable, they were less pleasing.
And to this we must add thousands of names of
new species which he had to coin, as the discoverer
of radiolaria, medusae, sponges, &c. In the radio-
laria alone he has formed and published the names
of more than 3,500 new species. I fancy that even
the oldest pastor of the most fertile congregation
has never conducted so many christenings. In
each case it was necessary to impose two names,
the generic and specific. We may well expect to
find a few that will not last, but the reader is
amazed at the philological creative power of this
busy godfather and the inexhaustibility of his
vocabulary; they show far more than the usual
training in humanities.
His real predilection was pronounced enough in
those early years. It was what the classical peda-
gogue would regard as child's play and waste of time
zoology and botany. A large double window in
his parents' house was fitted up as a conservatory,
and plants were gathered very zealously. His love
of botany was so great that any one would have
EARLY YOUTH 37
pronounced him a botanist in the making. But
fate determined that he was to be a zoologist. In
his eleventh year the boy, while paying a visit to
his uncle Bleek (a professor of theology !) at Bonn,
spent a whole day searching the remotest corners
of the Siebengebirg for the Erica cinerea, which he
had heard could not be found in any other part of
Germany. At the Merseburg school he had two
excellent teachers, Gandtner and Karl Gude, who
fostered his inclination, and changed it from a
mere collector's eagerness into the finer enjoyment
of the scientific mind. The young student wrote
a contribution to Garcke's Flora Hallensis. The
professional decision gives many a troubled hour.
It is significant to find that as the novice tended
his herbarium it dawned on him that there was a
weak point somewhere in the rigid classification
given in the manuals of botany. The books said
that there were so many fixed species, each invari-
ably recognisable by certain characters. But when
the youth tried to diagnose his plant-treasures in
practice by these rules, there seemed to be always
a few contraband species smuggled in, like the
spectres in the Wahlpurgis night to which the sage
vainly expostulates, " Begone : we have explained
you away." Often the individual specimens would
not agree with the lore of the books. There were
discrepancies ; sometimes they cut across one type,
sometimes another, and at times they shamelessly
stretched across the gap between one rubric and
another. What did it mean ? Were there really
no fixed species? Was "species " only an idea,
38 HAECKEL
and was the reality of the plant-world in a state of
flux like the sea ? Teachers and books insisted
that the " species " is, in its absolute nature, the
basis of all botanical science, the great and sacred
foundation that the Moses of botany and zoology ?
Linne, had laid down for ever. How could it
be so ?
The mature worker would look back on this
dilemma of his youth with a smile of satisfaction
thirty years afterwards. He would know then
what sort of a nut it was that he was trying to
crack in his early speculations. It was nothing
less than the magnificent problem that presented
itself to Darwin, the crucial question of the fixity
or variability of species. " The problem of the
constancy or transmutation of species," he wrote,
" arrested me with a lively interest when, twenty
years ago, as a boy of twelve years, I made a
resolute but fruitless effort to determine and dis-
tinguish the c good and bad species ' of black-
berries, willows, roses, and thistles. I look back
now with fond satisfaction on the concern and
painful scepticism that stirred my youthful spirits
as I wavered and hesitated (in the manner of most
* good classifiers,' as we called them) whether to
admit only ' good ' specimens into my herbarium
and reject the l bad,' or to embrace the latter and
form a complete chain of transitional forms be-
tween the c good species ' that would make an end
of all their ' goodness.' I got out of the difficulty
at the time by a compromise that I can recommend
to all classifiers. I made two collections. One,
EARLY YOUTH 39
arranged on official lines, offered to the sympathetic
observer all the species, in ' typical ' specimens,
as radically distinct forms, each decked with its
pretty label; the other was a private collection,
only shown to one trusted friend, and contained
only the rejected kinds that Goethe so happily
called ' the characterless or disorderly races, which
we hardly dare ascribe to a species, as they lose
themselves in infinite varieties/ such as rubus,
salix, verbascum, hieracium, rosa, cirsium, &c. In
this a large number of specimens, arranged in a
long series, illustrated the direct transition from
one good species to another. They were the
officially forbidden fruit of knowledge in which I
took a secret boyish delight in my leisure hours."
These little scruples, however, did not interfere
with what he felt to be the chief interest of botany.
The collecting of plants harmonises well with a
general love of nature and a passion for wandering
over hill and valley. Long walks had already
become a feature of his life. The scientific interest
made it superfluous to have a companion. Botany
went with him everywhere as his lady-love, and
remained ever faithful to him. " I have preferred
to travel alone most of my life/' he used to say to
me; "I never feel ennui when I am alone. My
love of and interest in nature are much better enter-
tainment than conversation." One of the features
in this interest at all times, even in later years,
was botanical research. The material for it is
found everywhere. Darwin, a great traveller with
an unusually strong appreciation of good scenery,
40 HAECKEL
has said that the traveller who would combine the
pursuit of knowledge with aesthetic satisfaction
must be above all a botanist (in the closing retro-
spect of his Naturalist's Voyage Hound the World,
one of the finest passages in the work). Whenever
Haeckel spoke in later years of his adopted Jena,
he never failed to explain, amongst the other excel-
lent qualities of the little university town, that so
many fine orchids grew in its woods. When he
left Jena to make the long voyage to Ceylon, his
last look was at the drops of dew that sparkled like
pearls " in the dark blue calices of the gentians, with
their tender lashes, that so richly decked the grass-
covered sides of the railway cutting." The Letters
from India, that described his voyage, owes a good
deal of its peculiar charm to his skill in botanical
description. I know no other work that approaches
it in conveying so effective an idea of the luxuriant
vegetation of the tropics.
In those early years there was one particular
point of close union between botany and the sense
of beauty. It was only two years before Haeckel's
birth that Goethe, the man who had put into
inimitable verse new and pregnant truths of
botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.
It is no longer a special distinction of any
prominent personality of the nineteenth century to
have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind of
natural necessity from which one cannot escape.
All that is great in the century can be traced
back to Goethe. He flows beneath it, like a dark
stream through the bowels of a mountain. Here
EARLY YOUTH 41
and there the flanks open and the stream becomes
visible ; not a restless bubbling spring, but a broad
mirror. There is, however, a closer following of
Goethe. There are a few strong spirits that have
been consciously inspired by him from the first
in all their thoughts ; have throughout life felt
themselves to be the apostles of the " gospel of
Goethe " ; and in every new creation of their own
have held that they did but reflect or expand
his ideas, did but carry on his principles to these
further conclusions. Haeckel is, in his whole
work, one of this smaller band ; his whole person-
ality is, in fact, one of its most conspicuous
manifestations in the second half of the century.
In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philo-
sophy. Goethe took from him his God, and gave
him a new one : took from him the external,
transcendental God of the Churches, and gave
him the God that is in all things, in the eternal
development of the world, in body and soul alike,
the God that embraces all reality and being,
beside whom there is no distinct " world," no
distinct " sinful man," no special beginning or
end of things. When Haeckel found himself, at
the highest point of his own path, by the side of
Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that
Darwin was but a stage in the logical development
of Goethe's ideas.
Fate decided that Haeckel should be even
externally in some sense an heir of the Goethe
epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had
regarded with such affection, and at which Schiller
42 HAECKEL
had toiled with his heart's blood in " sad, splendid
years/' owes its fame in the last third of the
century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of
adulation, but a simple truth, to say that among
the general public and abroad the reputation of
Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and
Fichte to Haeckel. His name stands for an epoch
in the life of Jena, like theirs; all that lies
between is forgotten and unknown. In the
district itself it is as if the old epochs and the
new came into direct touch.
I shall never forget the hour when this thought
came upon me in all its force. It was on a
snowless December day, when the dying fire of
autumn still lingered on the trees and bushes
where the blackbirds sang in front of the obser-
vatory. The table and seat of sandstone stood
out bleakly. A tablet indicated, in phrases of
Goethe's, that Schiller had dwelt there. It was
there that the Wallenstein was born. There the
two often sat in conversation the conversation of
two of the greatest minds of the time, each in his
way a master spirit. To-day the little dome of
the observatory looks down on the spot ; it is not
a luxurious building, but it is a stage in the
onward journey, a symbol of the nineteenth
century as it leaps into the twentieth. A little
farther off rises the modern structure of the
Zoological Institute. In Goethe's day no one
dreamed that such a building would ever be seen.
It was opened by Haeckel in 1884. The zoo-
logical collection it houses was chiefly brought
EARLY YOUTH 43
together under his direction. Amongst its trea-
sures are, besides Haeckel's corals and the like,
the outcome of the travels of Semon and Kiiken-
thal in Australia and New Guinea lands whose
very outline could barely be traced in the mist
when Schiller was a professor at Jena. At the
entrance there are two stuffed orangs, our distant
cousins. One wall of the lecture-hall is covered
with huge charts depicting the genealogical tree of
life, as it is drawn up by Haeckel. With what
eyes Schiller would have devoured them ! Yet
classic traits are not wanting. From Haeckel's
fine study in the Institute the eye falls on the
Hausberg, " the mountain-top from which the red
rays stream." It is the room in which the deep-
sea radiolaria of the Challenger Expedition were
studied, a zoological campaign in depths of the
ocean that were stranger to Schiller's days than
the surface of the moon is to us. Behind this
Goethe-Schiller seat at the observatory there is a
natural depression full of willows that reminds us
of the time when all was country here. But just
beyond it is a modern street " Ernst Haeckel
Street," as it was named, in honour of him, on the
occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Close to it is
the villa where he has lived for many years with
his devoted family, full of wonderful reminiscences
(oil-paintings and water-colours from his own
hand) of his many travels. In Schiller's day a
voyage to Ceylon would have been a life's work.
To-day it is an episode in an infinitely richer and
broader life. On the stone seat now we see the
44 HAECKEL
proud and handsome figure of the man himself,
recalling pleasantly the masters who have stood
here before him, the wide hat covering the white
hair that is belied by the rosy cheeks ; a straight
and strong figure, yet revealing in the finer lines
of the face the sensitive, aesthetic temper that
does not look on scientific investigation as a brutal
power of the dissecting knife, but remembers he is
the heir of Goethe, even in the Zoological Institute
yonder. Over my mind came the feeling of a
strange rebirth of things. I felt that life is an
eternally new and mystic resurrection, immeasur-
ably more wonderful and profound than all the
crude ideas of resurrection that have yet prevailed.
A mind such as we love to picture to ourselves in
our ideal of the future historian must seek the
eternal and constant features in all change, even
in two epochs that are so distinct and in the men
who have lived in them. It is our incorrigible
schoolmaster disposition that divides things. In
the real world there must be one straight line of
development. To-day the highest is sought in the
melody of immortal verse : to-morrow a Zoological
Institute rises on the spot where the poet had
stood.
It is said that the boy did not come under the
influence of Goethe without some difficulty. His
mother did not like Goethe ; she preferred Schiller.
Goethe was too great for every true soul to follow
him in his arduous path. Weimar itself had more
than once been disposed to desert him. How
much more the general public in its conventional
EARLY YOUTH 45
fetters ! How many fell away from him when he
published the Eoman Elegies, and again when
he brought out the Elective Affinities. In
Haeckel's youth people remembered Borne's narrow
and hostile strictures. Goethe began to penetrate
into the German family as a classic in spite of the
general feeling. But the German family was still
far below him. He had gradually to lift it up
from its Philistine level. At times it rebelled
against him, as every stubborn level does against
a peak. It was his aunt Bertha that first put
Goethe's works into the boy's hands. He received
them as a delightful piece of moral contraband.
Gottfried Keller has finely described, about the
same period, in his Green Henry, the effect of such
a revelation on a sensitive young man. A book-
seller brings to the house the whole of Goethe's
works, fifty small volumes with red covers and
gilded titles. The young Swiss Heinrich, Keller's
picture of himself, reads the volumes unceasingly
for thirty days, when they are taken away because
his mother cannot pay for them. But the thirty
days have been a dream to the boy. He seems to
see new and more brilliant stars in the heavens as
he looks up. When the books are removed, it is
as if a choir of bright angels have left the room.
"I went out into the open air. The old town on
the hill, the rocks and woods and river and sea
and the lines of the mountains lay in the gentle
light of the March sun, and as my eye fell on
them I felt a pure and lasting joy that I had never
known before. It was a generous love of all that
46 HAECKEL
lives, a love that respects the right and realises
the import of each thing, and feels the connected-
ness and depth of the world. This love is higher
than the artificial affection of the individual with
selfish aim that ever leads to pettiness and
caprice ; it is higher even than the enjoyment and
detachment that come of special and romantic
affections ; it alone can give us an unchanging
and lasting glow. Everything now came before
me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms.
I began to see and to love, not only the outer
form, but the inner content, the nature, and the
history of things." The poet compresses his
experience into one episode. In real life it comes
slowly, step by step. In fine, a third element was
born in the young botanist and lover of beauty
Goethe's view of life behind all else : that which
Goethe himself called " objective." The mystic
might call it a return to God : but it was Goethe's
God.
Three other books influenced Haeckel in his
school-days, besides the works of Goethe. The
first was Humboldt's Aspects of Nature. This is
another work that has had an effect on all the
sensitive spirits of the nineteenth century. It is
most unjustly depreciated by the young, blase 1
generation of our time, which dislikes the older
style. In the first two volumes of the Cosmos we
see the play of a great mind wherever we look
for it.
Then came Darwin's Naturalist's Voyage round
the World. The ardent youth had as yet on
EARLY YOUTH 47
suspicion what the name would one day mean to
him. Darwin was then regarded as a completed
work on which final judgment had been rendered.
He was appreciated as a traveller, a student of the
geology of South America, and especially as the
gifted investigator of the wonderful coral reefs of
the Indian Ocean. His name stood thus in all the
manuals, close even to that of Humboldt. Pro-
bably the young reader thought he had died long
before. At all events, no one had a presentiment
that this quiet naturalist and student of corals was
about to light a torch that would flame over the
world. The chief advantage that Haeckel drew
from the two works was an ardent desire to see the
tropics, with their virgin forests and blue coral
seas. It has come to so many after reading these
works, and persisted in their lives as the vivid
image of a dream, like that which drove Goethe to
Italy the dream of a home of the soul that must
one day be sought.
The third book was Schleiden's The Plant and
its Life. Matthias Jacob Schleiden was then in
the best of his power, and had an influence that
amounted to fascination on many of the younger
men. Behind him lay a terrible struggle. He
had begun his career as a lawyer, and had been so
unfortunate that he even attempted his life. With
his interest in botany a new life began, and he
worked with the energy of one raised from the
dead. He was certainly an original thinker. His
name is known to us to-day especially as the
founder of the cell-theory. This is the greatest
48 HAECKEL
distinction that he has earned. But at that time
he had a much more general importance as a
leader in the struggle to introduce ascertain method
of scientific research. A somewhat obscure epoch
was coming to a close, a more or less superficial
natural philosophy having sought to replace sound
investigation. The struggle had ended with the
decisive victory of the simple discovery of facts.
There was everywhere a vague feeling that the
progress of science was best secured by a bald
enumeration and registration of bones, of the joints
in the limbs of insects, or of pollen-filaments,
rather than by the romantic and spirited leaps of
natural philosophy over all the real problems into
the heavens above. The question now arose
whether this narrow method really exhausted the
nature of things ; whether scientific specialism,
with its laurels of victory, would not prove in the
end an equally dangerous enemy. What was
" better " for the time being might be very far
from really "good." It was here that Schleiden
stepped in. He fought against the prevailing
specialism, at first in his own particular province
of botany. He did not, indeed, take up the cause
of the exploded pyrotechnics of the older natural
philosophy, but pleaded for more general critical-
philosophical methods. These must be preserved
in any circumstances. The great botanist, he said,
is not the man who can determine ten thousand
species of plants according to the received models,
but the man of clear logic and wide deductions
from his lore. Botany must be conceived as a
EARLY YOUTH 49
distinct branch of general thought ; otherwise it is
worthless, and its herbarium may rot unnoticed in
the corner and its discoveries be the outcome of
blind hazard. Schleiden himself had no perception
of the great idea that Darwin was to bring into his
province afterwards the idea of the variability of
species and of evolution, which brought to a criti-
cal stage the question whether the botanist was to
be merely a subordinate museum-secretary or a
creative thinker, a prophet of nature to whom
plants would be part of a general philosophy, a
part of God in the ideal sense of evolution. Yet
Schleiden's simple warning cry made a deep im-
pression on many of the young men especially.
There was a note of aspiration in it, an assurance
that they were waiting for a sun that must rise
somewhere. He was a master of language. There
was the stuff: of the poet in him. His works strayed
out far beyond the range of his own province.
Haeckel himself did the same work in later years.
It is no wonder that Schleiden had a magical
influence over him. In this case, indeed, it seemed
as if the attraction was to determine his own
career.
Schleiden taught botany at Jena University.
Haeckel was still in the higher forms of his school
at Merseburg, and remained there when his father
resigned his position in the State service, and
eventually removed to Berlin. At this time the
ardent botanist decided to adopt the science of
plants as his life-study when his final examination
was over. Schleiden would teach him how to
4
50 HAECKEL
combine philosophy with botany. Then he would
try to roam over the world as a practical botanist
and visit the far-oS zones where Mother Earth
poured out her cornucopia of forms so generously.
While still in the higher form at school he made
a preliminary visit to Jena. Everything seemed
so pleasant and charming. He made the journey
on foot. These long walks have always been his
pride to start out like a travelling scholar, with
hardly anything in his pocket, to live on bread and
water, and sleep in the hay at night ; but to enjoy
to the full all the incomparable delights that the
great magician, nature, provides for the faithful
novice scenery, beautiful orchids, thoughts of God,
Goethe, and the world. It was in 1849 that he
visited Jena. He has described it himself : " After
I had reverently admired the Goethe-room in the
castle of Dornburg, I wandered, on a hot July day,
over the shady meadows to Jena, singing lustily
with my gay comrades. As I entered the venerable
old market-place I found a troop of lively students
in front of the Burgkeller, with coloured caps and
long pipes, singing, and drinking the famous Lich-
tenhain beer from wooden tankards. It made a
great impression on me, and as I took a tankard
with them I made up my mind that I would some
day be one of them."
CHAPTER II
AT THE UNIVEESITY
IT was botany itself that thwarted all these
designs. The examination had passed off
happily. Booms were taken at Jena, at the
Easter of 1852, for the advanced study under
Schleiden. Then the indefatigable collector had
an adventure on a cold March day. He spent
hours in the wet meadows by the river Saale,
searching for a rare plant, the squill (Scilla
bifolia). He met with the fate of the angler in
the story, who fell into the water in his haste
to secure his big pike. He landed the fish, but
not himself. The plant was found, but Haeckel's
zeal was punished with a severe rheumatism.
He had to go home to his parents at Berlin to
be tended. At Berlin he begins his studies, and
the event to some extent decides his career. It
would now be many years before he would see
Jena again ; and through his efforts it would
become one of the leading schools, not of botany,
but of zoology a school of philosophical zoology,
however, in the sense of Schleiden.
51
52 HAECKEL
Berlin had secured a botanist of the first rank
a year before, Alexander Braun. He, too, was
a thoughtful botanist, who would in his way agree
very well with Schleiden. He was convinced that
botany did not wholly consist in the determina-
tion of new plant-forms and the almost fruitless
effort to set up a system on which all particular
diagnoses would be rigidly played as on a piano.
He believed that there must be a more profound
conception of it, which would take "form," as
such, as one of its problems, and would aim, not
at the formation of as large a collection as possible,
but at the construction of a science for which
Goethe had long ago found a name morphology,
or the science of forms. It happened that Braun
was a friendly visitor at the house of Haeckel's
parents at Berlin. The now convalescent fresh-
man became devoted to him, body and soul ; they
became close friends, not merely master and
pupil. Berlin at that time afforded many an
opportunity for practical botanising. Bare marsh-
plants then flourished in the bed of the Spree,
which has since been cleared. The Botanical
Garden was full of good things. Haeckel used
to tell with pride, long afterwards, with what
readiness he flung himself into the work, practical
as well as theoretical, on these excursions with
Professor Braun. " On one of our botanical
expeditions we wanted to get a floating chara
from a pond. Braun took off his boots in his
usual way in order to wade to the spot. But I
was before him. I quickly undressed, forgot my
AT THE UNIVERSITY 53
naughty rheumatism, and swam to the spot, to
bring him a quantity of the plant he wanted.
That was my first piece of heroism, perhaps my
greatest."
But in all this pleasant botanising there was
no serious outlook on his future profession.
Haeckel's father, with his official way of looking
at things, could not reconcile himself to scientific
research as an avocation. It is an old belief
that the way to all preoccupation with the science
of living things lies through medicine. One may
question that to-day. It was the rock on which
Darwin nearly came to grief. A man may be
a very gifted botanist, yet be quite unfitted for
the medical profession. One must have a real
vocation to become a physician, more than for
any other calling, or else it is a hopeless blunder.
The talents are divided in much the same way
as between the historian and the soldier. It is
true that the two may be united, but it is equally
true that very good historians have made very
poor soldiers. What the medical man learns in
his studies is, of course, always valuable. But
it offers no test of personal talent for scientific
research, nor should it be supposed that a capacity
of this kind would be able, by mere formal study,
to acquire the true qualities of a physician. We
must learn to appreciate the physician's calling too
much ever to look on it as an incidental occupation.
It always reminds me of the amiable notion of the
Philistine, that a man with a turn for poetry
must first take up some solid profession, and then,
54 HAECKEL
once he is " in the saddle," pour out verses in his
leisure hours. Poetry can never be a mistress :
it demands marriage or nothing. Otherwise
well, we have instances enough.
Haeckel himself afterwards said that he only
acceded to his father's wish, that he should study
medicine, with a botanical mental reservation.
He thought of going through the discipline
conscientiously until he became a physician, and
then secure a place as ship's doctor, and travel
over the world and see the tropics. Things turned
out very differently. He never became a medical
man such as his father had wished, but he passed
over the profession into zoology. Botany re-
mained the lost and never-forgotten love of his
youth. When we look back on his whole career
we can see that he was, on the whole, fortunate.
Zoology afforded a richer, more abundant, and
more varied material at that time. It proved
to be more " philosophical." He went after his
father's asses and found a kingdom. But to him
personally it seemed to be an unmistakable re-
nunciation the first in an active career that
was to see many resignations.
"He goes farthest who does not know where
he is going."
Haeckel once applied this motto to himself
and his star, in a humorous after-dinner speech.
With this kind of safe predestination he reached
Wurtzburg in the autumn of 1852 as a medical
student. Medicine had in those days received
AT THE UNIVERSITY 55
an entirely new theoretical basis from Wiirtzburg
a basis that was calculated to attract a young
inquirer, who brought much more of the general
Faust-spirit to his work than aspiration to the
profession and the doctor's cap, or the practical
side.
Let us recall for a moment how medicine had
gradually reached the position of an independent
science. Medicine was the outcome of a remote
mythical epoch. It was content with the effect
of certain venerable traditional medicaments on
the living body, but knew little or nothing of
the inner structure of the body on which it tried
its drugs. The dissection and examination of
even a corpse was regarded as a deadly sin, and
was visited with secular punishment. Scientific
medicine did not exist until this prohibition was
removed ; its first and most necessary foundation
was anatomy, the science of the bodily structure
and its organs. The art of " cutting up " bodies
had seemed too revolting. Moreover, no sooner
had the science of anatomy been founded than
the range of the human eye itself was considerably
enlarged. The microscope was invented. A new
world came to light in the dissection of the body.
Beyond their external appearance it revealed the
internal composition of the various organs. The
eye sees a shred of skin, a piece of intestine, or
a section of the liver. The microscope fastens on
a tiny particle of this portion of the body, and
reveals in it a deeper layer of unsuspected
structures. It is well known in the history of
56 HAECKEL
microscopic discovery that the more powerful
lenses and the improved methods of research were
only gradually introduced, and enabled students
to found a new and much profounder anatomy.
As soon as this science appeared it was given
the special name of " histology," or the science
of the tissues (histd). Its particular achievement
is the discovery that in man, the animal, and
the plant, all the parts of the body prove, when
sufficiently magnified, to be composed of small
living elements, which are known as cells. The
discovery of the cell was made in the latter part
of the third decade of the nineteenth century.
These cells join together in homogeneous groups
in order to accomplish one or other function in the
body, and thus form its " tissues." Their intricate
structure is unravelled by the histologist, micro-
scope in hand. It is evident that in this way
a new basis was provided for anatomy, and there-
fore also for medicine. In the fifties Wiirtzburg
was the leading school of histology, or the science
of these tissues composed of cells. Albert Kolliker,
professor of anatomy there since 1847, published
his splendid Manual of Histology at the very time
when Haeckel was studying under him. Franz
Ley dig, a tutor there since 1849, was working
in the same direction. The third member of the
group, made professor in 1849, was Eudolf
Virchow, a young teacher then in his best years.
It was Virchow who did most to bring practical
medicine into line with histology. As the vital
processes in the human body seemed to him, with
AT THE UNIVERSITY 57
his strict histological outlook, to be traced back
always to the tissue-building cells, he concluded
that disease also, or the pathological condition
of the body, and therefore the proper field of the
medical man, was a process in these cells. Man
seemed to him to be a " cell-state" : the tissues
were the various active social strata in this state :
and disease was, in its ultimate source, a conflict
in the state between the citizens, the tissue-
forming cells, that normally divide the work
amongst them for the common good. Pathology
must be cellular pathology. The science was
already being taught by Virchow at Wurtzburg,
and the dry bones of it were covered with flesh
for his hearers. But his ideas were not published
until a few years afterwards (1858).
In the first three terms Haeckel studied chiefly
under Kolliker and Ley dig. They taught him
animal and human embryology, as it was then
conceived. Embryology was the science of the
development of the individual animal or man,
the description of the series of changes that the
chick passes through in the egg or the human
embryo in the womb. This science, also, had
been profoundly affected by the invention of the
microscope. Firstly, the spermatozoa, the active,
microscopically small particles in the animal and
human sperm, had been discovered. Then, in
the twenties, Karl Ernst von Baer had discovered
the human ovum. The relation of these things
to the cell-theory was clear. It was indubitable
that each of these male spermatozoa and each
58 HAECKEL
female ovum was a cell. They melted together
and were blended into a new cell in the act of
procreation, and from this, by a process of repeated
cleavage of cells, the new individual was developed
with all his millions of cells and all the elaborate
tissues that these cells united to form. A whole
world of marvellous features came to light, but the
key to the unriddling of them was still wanting.
However, the Wiirtzburg school was at least
agreed as to method, which was the main thing ;
its leaders were determined to press on to the
solution of these problems on purely scientific
lines. Everything was to be brought into a
logical relation of cause and effect, and there
was to be no intrusion of the supernatural, no
mysticism. Natural laws must be traced in the
life of the cells and in the history of the ovum
and the embryo. The cells were to be regarded
in the same way as the astronomer regards his
myriads of glittering bodies. In this way the
science of histology had been founded, and
embryology had assumed a scientific character
in the hands of Von Baer. The microscope kept
the attention of students to facts, and did not
suffer them to lose themselves in the clouds.
Thus a foundation-stone was laid in Haeckel's
thoughts which he would never discard.
In the later years of the Darwinian controversy
he was destined to come into sharp conflict with
both Yirchow and Kolliker. Each of them came
to look on him as the sober hen does on the
naughty chick it has brought into the world,
AT THE UNIVERSITY 59
that madly tries to swim on the treacherous
waters of Darwinism. But forty years afterwards
after many a knife-edged word had been thrown
in the struggle the aged Kolliker was one of
those who entered their names in the list of men
of science who erected a bust in the Zoological
Institute at Jena in honour of Haeckel's sixtieth
birthday.
However, it was a different, an apparently
trivial, yet, as it turned out, most momentous
interest that quickened him during these Univer-
sity years.
The impulse to microscopic research, that had
led to the foundation of histology and embryology,
had brought about a third great advance which
had an important bearing on zoology. When we
stroll along the beautiful shore of the Mediter-
ranean at Naples to-day, with eyes bent on the
blue surface from which Capri rises like a siren,
and on the cloud-capped Vesuvius with its violet
streaks of lava cutting across the green country,
we notice in the foreground of the picture a stout
building, with very large windows, planted with
the boldness of a parvenu amongst the foliage.
It is the " Zoological Station," built by Dohrn,
a German zoologist, at the beginning of the
seventies. Anton Dohrn was one of Haeckel's first
pupils, and was personally initiated by him into
the study of marine life, at Heligoland in 1865.
Zoologists who work in the station to-day find it
very comfortable. Little steamers with dipping
apparatus bring the inhabitants of the bay to
60 HAECKEL
them. There is a large aquarium at hand. You
sit down to your microscope, and work. The
material is " fresh to hand " every day. There
are now many of these stations at well-exposed
spots on the coast in various countries sea-
observatories, as it were, in which the student
examines his marine objects much as the
astronomer observes his planets and comets and
double stars at night. To-day, when a young
man is taking up zoology, and he is asked what
university he is going to, he may say that he
is going down to the coast, to Naples, to do
practical work. When the long vacation comes,
swarms of professors go from the inland towns
to one or other seaside place, as far as the purse
will take them. All this is a new thing under
the sun. The zoologist of the olden days sat in
his study at home. He caught and studied what-
ever was found in his own district. The rest came
by post skins, skeletons, amphibians and fishes
in spirit, dried insects, hard shells of Crustacea,
mussels and snails of all sorts ; but only the
shells always, the hard, dry parts of star-
fishes, sea-urchins, corals, &c. Animals of the
rarest character were thrown away because they
could not very well be preserved in spirit and
sent from the North Sea or the Mediterranean
to Professor Dry-as-dust. In this state of things
the advance in microscopic work brought no
advantage. But at last it dawned on students
that the sea is the cradle of the animal world.
Whole stems of animals flourished there, and
AT THE UNIVERSITY 61
there only. Every wave was full of innumerable
microscopic creatures, of the most instructive
forms. Amongst them were found the young
embryonic forms of familiar animals. At last the
cry, " To the sea," was raised. The older
professor of zoology had suffered from a kind of
hydrophobia. It was not possible to teach very
much at Berlin about the anatomy, histology, and
embryology of the sea-urchin from a few dried
flinty shells. At Wurtzburg, animals were subtly
discussed by men who had never made a journey
to see them, while they were trampled under foot
every day by the visitors bathing in Heligoland.
They must move. It was not necessary to go
round the world : a holiday journey to the North
Sea or the Mediterranean would suffice. Every
cultured man had always considered that he must
make at least one pilgrimage to classic lands
before his education was complete. It was only
a question of changing material. They were not
to confine themselves to examining ruined temples
and aqueducts, but to take their microscopes down
to the coast, draw a bucketful of sea- water, and
examine its living contents the living medusa
and sea-urchin, and the living world of the
swarming infusoria. But it was like the rending
of the great curtain of the temple. Zoology
seemed to expand ten-fold, a hundred-fold, in a
moment. A room in an obscure inn by the sea,
a microscope, and a couple of glasses of salt-water
with sediment every morning and the finest
studies at Paris and London were as ploughed
62 HAECKEL
land, without a single blade, in face of this
revelation. It was a Noah's ark in the space of
a pinch of snuff.
One day the young medical student heard, in
the middle of his histology and zoology, that
Kolliker had come back from Messina. He had
been studying lower marine life there. In 1853,
two young men were together in the Gutenberg
forest near Wiirtzburg. One of them, Karl
Gegenbaur, had been abroad with Kolliker. With
his impressions still fresh, he tells Haeckel about
his zoological adventures in the land of the
Cyclops.
Gegenbaur, eight years older than Haeckel, was
by birth and education a typical Wiirtzburger. He,
too, had studied medicine, and had practised at the
hospital. But he had already advanced beyond
that. His stay at Messina had been devoted
entirely to zoological purposes. A year later he
would be teaching anatomy at Wiirtzburg, and a
year later still he would be called to Jena. From
that time he began to be known as a master of
comparative anatomy especially after 1859, when
his Elements of the science was published, a classic
in its way that still exercises some influence.
There is nothing romantic in his career, nor
could we seek any element of the kind in a
man of Gegenbaur's character. But his young
and undecided companion seemed to catch sight
of a new ideal as he spoke. He would complete
his medical studies, and then shake himself free
of surgery and hospital. He would take his
AT THE UNIVERSITY 63
microscope down South, where the snowy summit
of Etna towered above the orange-trees, and study
the beautiful marine animals by the azure sea
and the white houses, in the orange-laden air, and
drink in ideas at the magic fount of these wonderful
animal forms, and live out the lusty, golden years
of youth on the finest coast in Europe. From
that moment Haeckel felt a restless inspiration.
He had no idea what it was that he was going to
investigate at Messina ; and he certainly did not
know when and how he was to get there. But
he continued his medical studies with a vague
hope that it was only preliminary work ; that some
day he would do what his friend Gegenbaur had
done.
They were very good friends, these two. They
were drawn together by the strong magnetism of
two true natures that understood each other to
the golden core, though in other respects they
were as different as possible. Gegenbaur was no
enthusiast. His ideal was " to keep cool to the
very heart." But he was at one with Haeckel
in a feeling for a broad outlook in scientific re-
search. He never shrank from large connections or
vast deductions, as long as they were led up to by
a sober and patient logic. This logical character
he afterwards recognised in Darwin's idea of
evolution, and so the friends once more found
themselves in agreement, and for a long time
they were a pair of real Darwinian Dioscuri.
This feeling for moderation and at the same time
for far-reaching logic was combined in Gegenbaur
64 HAECKEL
with a certain steady and unerring independence
of character. He made little noise, but he never
swerved from his aim. What he accomplished
with all these qualities, in many other provinces
besides Darwinism, cannot be told here. It may
be read in the history of zoology. He had, as far
as such a thing was possible, a restful influence
of the most useful character on Haeckel. If we
imagine what Darwinism would have become in
the nineteenth century in the hands of such men
as Gegenbaur, without Haeckel, we can appreciate
the difference in temperament between the two
men. With Gegenbaur evolution was always a
splendid new technical instrument that no layman
must touch for fear of spoiling it. With Haeckel
it became a devouring wave, that will one day,
perhaps, give its name to the century. In other
natures these differences might have led to open
conflict. But Haeckel and Gegenbaur show us
that, like so many of our supposed " differences,"
they can at least live together in perfect accord
in the freshest years of life, each bearing fruit in
its kind.
When we find Haeckel intimate in this way with
Gegenbaur, his senior by eight years, we realise
how close he was at that time to the whole of the
Wiirtzburg circle. The two generations were not
yet sharply divided, as they subsequently were.
Most of them fought either with or against him at
a later date, but they belonged, at all events, to
the same stratum. But the split between the two
AT THE UNIVERSITY 65
generations was felt when one pronounced the
name of Johannes Miiller, of Berlin the physiolo-
gist (not the historian).
All who then taught histology, embryology,
comparative anatomy, or cellular pathology at
Wiirtzburg had sat at his feet, either spiritually
or in person. Johannes Miiller, born at the
beginning of the century, was appointed Professor
of Anatomy and Physiology at Berlin the year
before Haeckel was born. That indicates the
distance between them. It was in Miiller's incre-
dibly primitive laboratory that, as Haeckel tells,
the theory of the animal cell was established by
his assistant, Theodor Schwann, after Schleiden
had proved the vegetal cell. Miiller himself had
founded histology in his own way. He was the
real parent of the idea that the zoologist ought
to go and work by the sea. We have a model of
this kind of work and at the same time a superb
work for embryological matters in Miiller's epoch-
making Studies of the Larvce and Metamorphoses
of the Echinoderms. He had brought comparative
anatomy beyond the stage of Cuvier, to a point
where Gegenbaur could begin. From his school
came Rudolf Virchow, who applied the cell-theory
to medicine, and Emil du Bois-Eeymond, who
opened out a new path in physiology by his studies
of animal electricity. Miiller had done pioneer
work with remarkable vigour in all the various
branches of research, diverging afterwards to an
enormous extent, that pursue these methods.
The many-headed (young and half-young) genera-
5
66 HAECKEL
tion, in which Haeckel was growing, saw the whole
previous generation embodied in the single name
of Miiller. He seemed to be a kind of scientific
Winkelried, except that the fifty spears he bore on
his breast were so many lines of progress eman-
ating from him alone.
Johannes Miiller had the great and splendid
gift of never lying on the shoulders of his pupils
with an Alpine weight of authority. It was a
secret of his personality that we admire but can
hardly express in words to-day. Everybody learned
from him what a great individuality is. He
exerted a kind of moral suggestion in teaching men
to be free, great, enlightened, and true. His
pupils have worked at the development of his ideas
with absolute freedom. No part of them was to
be regarded as sacred, and, as a matter of fact,
in the chief questions no part has remained.
One approaches the inner life of a man like
Miiller with a certain timidity, and asks how he
became what he was. There can be no question
that the fundamental trait of his character was a
peculiarly deep religious feeling. At heart he was
a mystic. The whole magic of his personal influ-
ence sprang from these depths. By profession he
was a physiologist, an exact scientist. Never did
he swerve a hair's breadth from the iron laws of
research. But beneath it all was a suppressed
glow of fervour. Every one who understood him,
every one who was a true pupil of his, learned it by
a kind of hypnotism. Externally he was all for
laborious investigation, whether in dissecting a
AT THE UNIVERSITY 67
star-fish for you or classifying fishes though he
would have a full sense of your ardent longing for
an inner trust in life and a philosophy of life. Both
elements might change considerably in the pupil :
the method of investigation without the ideal of
the comprehensive vision within. But what never
left any man who had followed Miiller was the
warning cry that these things, within and without,
should go together ; that, in the larger sense, it is
not possible to count the joints in the stalk of an
encrinite without feeling a thrill in the deepest
depth of the mind and the heart.
It is so common a spectacle in history for dis-
ciples to condemn their masters with cold smiles
that we forget how pitiful it is. No pupil of
Johannes Miiller has ever felt that he had done
with him, and might quit him with ingratitude.
He had pupils, it is true, who did not lack belief
in themselves, and who became famous enough to
give them a sense of power ; men who have even-
tually come to conclusions diametrically opposed to
those that Miiller had taught them. Yet they re-
spect him. Living witnesses still tell of the glance
that bored into you, and could not be evaded.
But there must have been a greater power in the
man than this piercing glance. It was a glance
that survived the grave, and laid on one a duty ;
a glance that shot up in the darkness of memory
if the duty was not fulfilled the duty of going to
the foundation of things. Whether you are exam-
ining the larva of an echinoderm or the light of a
distant star, God is there. Whether you explain
68 HAECKEL
your echinoderm-larva in this way or that ; whether
you believe your star to be a sun or a burnt-out
cinder ; whether you conceive God in this way or
another you shall feel that the bridge is there
in absolutely everything. Every glance into the
microscope is a service of God. It was Goethe's
deepest min that threw a great, radiant spark out
of this curious, dark, angular, unintelligible jewel.
Such a man was bound to be more than Kolliker,
Virchow, and Gegenbaur to Haeckel. Miiller was
still teaching at Berlin, and Haeckel's best star
brought him to sit in reality at the feet of the
great teacher, who could so well speak soul to
soul to him.
At the Easter of 1854 Haeckel returned from
Wiirtzburg to Berlin. He was now twenty years
old, and it was at this juncture that, to use his
own phrase, the vast impression of Miiller fell on
him. A portrait of Miiller still hangs over the
desk in his study in the Zoological Institute at
Jena. " If I ever become tired at my work," he
says, "I have only to look at it to get new
strength." The influence of the much older man,
who, however, died at a far earlier age than
Haeckel will do, only lasted for a short time. But
Haeckel has preserved a memory of him that is
only eclipsed by the memory of one other man
Darwin. Miiller did not live to read Darwin's
decisive work, so that these two great ideals of
HaeckePs never crossed each other, either for good
or evil. He himself felt that there was a pure
evolution from one to the other in his mind.
AT THE UNIVERSITY 69
In the summer of 1854 he studied comparative
anatomy under Muller, for which Kolliker had
sufficiently prepared him. He has recorded his
first impressions. " I soon got to know him
personally, but I had so great a respect for him
that I did not venture to approach him more
closely. He gave me permission to work in the
museum. I shall never forget the hours I spent
there, drawing skulls, while he walked up and
down, especially on Sunday afternoons. Often
when he went past me I wanted to ask him some-
thing. I went up the step with beating heart and
took hold of the bell, but returned without ven-
turing to say anything." Muller took some notice
of the zealous young student. When the long
vacation came round in August, and the master,
following the new custom, packed up his bundle
in order to spend two months on practical work
by the sea, he allowed Haeckel to go with him.
Miiller's son and the later Professor La Valette
joined the party. They went to Heligoland.
Muller taught his pupils his simple method of
studying the living subject. There was no witch-
craft in it, but it had had to be invented by some
one. They put out to sea in a small boat. A little
net of linen or fine gauze, with a wide opening and
short body, was fastened on a pole. The mouth of
the net was thrust directly under the surface or a
little deeper, vertically to the surface, and the boat
was slowly rowed forward. The contents of the
filtered sea-water remained in the meshes of the
net, and were from time to time emptied into a
70 HAECKEL
glass containing sea- water. "I shall never/' says
Haeckel, " forget the astonishment with which I
gazed for the first time on the swarm of transparent
marine animals that Miiller emptied out of his fine
net into the glass vessel ; the beautiful medley of
graceful medusae and iridescent ctenophores, arrow-
like sagittse and serpent-shaped tomopteris, the
masses of copepods and schizopods, and the marine
larvae of worms and echinoderms." Miiller called
these very fine and generally transparent creatures,
of whose existence no one hitherto had had any
idea, " pelagic sweepings" (from pelagos, the sea).
More recently the word " pancton " (swimming
matter) has been substituted for his phrase. As
we now send whole expeditions over the seas to
study " pancton," the word has found its way into
ordinary literature. The regular anglers who were
then in Heligoland must have looked on this subtle
work with a butterfly net as a sort of pleasant
joke born from the professional brain. The young
student must have made an impression on them
with his vigour, though he had not yet turned
himself into a marine mammal, living half in the
water for days together. They called him a " sea-
devil." What pleased the master most in him
was the talent he already showed of quickly
sketching the tiny, perishable creature from the
surface of the sea while it was fresh. Haeckel had
been passionately fond of drawing from his early
years. Now the old bent agreed with the new zeal
for zoology. " You will be able to do a great deal,"
Miiller said to him. "And when once you are
ISHING :s Hi-iv-oiA^
Ar.:on IVhrn Richxrd Gneef
vNapksK M.irt>u-.
Max Silver. 1 . A
Err?: Haeckel
AT THE UNIVERSITY 71
fairly interested in this fairy-land of the sea, you
will find it difficult to get away from it." The
dream of Messina, that Gegenbaur had conjured
up, seemed to draw nearer.
These lively days at Heligoland provided
Haeckel with the material for his first little zoo-
logical essay. It dealt with the development of
the ova of certain fishes (On the Ova of the Scom-
ber esoces, published in Miiller's Archiv for 1855).
Miiller lent him ova from the Berlin collection to
complete his study. It is the same volume of the
Archiv in which, in Reichert's introduction, the
great controversy breaks out over Virchow's preg-
nant assertion that each human being is a state
composed of millions of individual cells.
Haeckel remained with Miiller at Berlin for the
whole winter, and was drawn more and more into
the province of comparative anatomy, or, to speak
more correctly, zoology. The official Professor
of Zoology at Berlin at the time was really the
aged Lichtenstein, who had occupied the chair
since 1811. Haeckel has humorously described
himself in later years as self-taught in his own
subject, saying that he had attended many most
excellent colleges, but never visited an official
school of zoology. The only opportunity to do so
at the time was under Lichtenstein, but that
professor bored him so much that he could not
attend his lectures. Lichtenstein was a venerable
representative of the old type of zoologist ; his
ideal was to give a careful external description
of the species on the strength of specimens chosen
72 HAECKEL
from a well-stocked museum. A whole world lay
between these surviving followers of Linne and
the splendid school of Johannes Miiller.
However that may be, the fact was that under
these alluring attractions HaeckePs studies were
drifting from the medical profession to an " impe-
cunious art." But as medical work had been
chosen, if only as a temporary occupation,
Haeckel had to tear himself away from the great
magnet, at the Easter of 1855, by removing to
a diSerent place. He chose, as the least intoler-
able compromise, to return to Wiirtzburg. At all
events we find him spending three terms there.
I have already said that Kudolf Virchow was one
of the distinguished Wiirtzburgers at the time
who sought most keenly the solution of the new
problems of biology on the medical side. Hence
Yirchow had to help him to find the bridge
between the work he really loved and the work
he was obliged to do. As a fact, Virchow directed
the whole of his studies on this side in the three
terms.
Virchow was not so fascinating as Johannes
Miiller, even in his best years. But it was some-
thing to be initiated into medical science by such
a man. A later generation has, unfortunately,
grown accustomed to see mental antipodes in
Virchow and Haeckel. In 1877 they had a
controversy with regard to the freedom of science
that echoed through the whole w v ld of thought.
Yet seventeen years afterwards He ^ckel himself
(who was first attacked by Virchow), looking back
AT THE UNIVERSITY 73
on the days he spent at Wurtzburg, had nothing
but grateful recognition to say of Virchow. "I
learned," he says in 1894, " in the three terms I
spent under Virchow the art of the finest analytic
observation and the most rigorous control of what
I observed. I was his assistant for some time,
and my notes were especially praised by him.
But what I chiefly admired in him at Wurtzburg
was his wide outlook, the breadth and philosophic
character of his scientific ideas. "
The theory that Virchow put before his pupils
was pure Monism, or a unified conception of the
world without any distinction of physical and
metaphysical. Life was defined, not as a mystic
eccentricity in an orderly nature, but plainly as
a higher form of the great cosmic mechanism.
Man, the object of medical science, was said to be
merely a higher vertebrate, subject to the same
laws as the rest.
We can see very well that this was quite natural.
If there was any man likely to put forward such
views it was Virchow. He had passed through
Miiller's school, but was now one of the younger
group who, even during Miiller's life, were gradu-
ally adopting certain very profound views on life
and man, without any particular resistance on the
master's part. The chief characteristic of nearly
the whole of this group was the lack of the vol-
canic stratum below of deep and personal religious
feeling ; in Miiller this had been throughout life
an enchained Titan among the rocks of his logical
sense of realities, yet it had given a gentle glow
74 HAECKEL
and movement to the floor of his mind. Rudolf
Virchow was the coolest, boldest, and clearest-
minded of the group. He went to the opposite
extreme. If Miiller was standing on a volcano,
which he only repressed by the giant force of his
will a nature that was above all master of itself
Virchow, on the contrary, was standing on a
glacier, and he had never taken the trouble to
conceal it. I should not venture to count him
amongst the instinctively Monistic minds, in the
sense of Goethe, to whom the unity of God and
nature, the inorganic and the organic, the animal
and the man, comes as an ardent and irresistible
feeling. But it would have been strange if, in
those years and in the middle of the whole scien-
tific current of his time, his own organ, his icy
logic, had not led him to the same conclusion ;
that it is a simpler method of research to
believe in natural law alone, to regard the living
merely as a complex play of the same forces that
we have in physics and chemistry, and to consider
man, with the bodily frame of an ape-like mammal,
to be really such an animal. I believe, indeed, that
Virchow never abandoned this simple solution in
his own mind at any part of his career. The con-
troversy he afterwards engaged in ran on different
lines. It seems to me that at an early stage of
his development he became convinced that there
must be limits to scientific inquiry, not on logical,
but on diplomatic grounds ; because it is not an
absolute agency, but only a relatively small force
amongst many more powerful institutions, the
AT THE UNIVERSITY 75
Church, the State, and so on. Hence it would
have to respect limitations that were not drawn
from its own nature ; in given cases it would have
to keep silent in order not to jeopardise its exist-
ence as a whole. It is my firm belief that this
diplomatic attitude as such would lead to the
destruction of all pursuit of the truth. It
carefully excludes the possibility of any further
martyrdoms, but at the cost of science's own j
power to illumine the world. In my opinion the j
free investigation of the truth is an absolute \
right. Churches, States, social orders, moral
precepts, and all that is connected with them,
have to adjust themselves to this investigation,
and not the reverse.
However, the point is that under Virchow
more particularly under Virchow, in fact Haeckel
would be educated into the general attitude with
regard to God, nature, life, and man, to which he
has since devoted his whole energy. In spite of
Goethe and who would be likely to take Goethe
as his guide in his twenty-first year ? the ardent
young student was as yet by no means firmly
seated in the saddle. He grubbed, and sought,
and rejected. In his Eiddle of the Universe he
tells us that he " defended the Christian belief in
his twenty-first year in lively discussions " with his
free- thinking comrades, . . . " although the study
of human anatomy and physiology, and the
comparison of man's frame with that of the other
animals, had already greatly enfeebled my faith.
I did not entirely abandon it, after bitter struggles,
76 HAECKEL
until my medical studies were completed, and I
began to practise. I then came to understand
Faust's saying, ' The whole sorrow of humanity
oppresses me.' I found no more of the infinite
benevolence of a loving father in the hard school
of life than I could see of ' wise providence ' in the
struggle for existence."
When the three terms of medical training were
over, he received another impulse to his own
particular interest in science. Kolliker invited
him in August, 1856, to spend the two months'
holiday with him on the Riviera. It was the
first Mediterranean school of zoology, though as
yet only a kind of " payment on account." On the
journey he made the acquaintance of the zoological
museum at Turin and its well-travelled director,
Filippo de Filippi, and he saw the grandeur of
the Maritime Alps on the Col di Tenda. The
master, Kolliker, Heinrich Miiller, Karl Kupffer
(afterwards professor at Munich), and he established
themselves at Nice, and fished for all sorts of
creatures with the Miiller net at Villefranche.
Fortunately, Miiller himself happened to be visiting
the Eiviera at the same time, and they received
a direct stimulus from him. The first result of
this journey in the summer and autumn was that
Haeckel secured his degree with a zoological-
anatomical work, instead of with a strictly medical
treatise. As he had done from Heligoland two
years before, he now brought home from the
Mediterranean the material for a short technical
theme. He again spent the winter at Berlin to
AT THE UNIVEKSITY 77
put it together. It was an histological study of
the tissues of crabs, and therefore lay in the
province of the articulates, an animal group, it is
curious to note, which he has not entered into
more fully in the course of his long and varied
work as special investigator. At Nice he made a
thorough study of the nerve-tubes of the spiny
lobster and other available marine Crustacea,
and discovered several remarkable new structural
features in them. At Berlin he entered upon
a minute microscopic study of the common craw-
fish. His dissertation for the doctorate embodied
the main results of his research. It was entitled
De telis quibusdam Astaci fluviatilis, and was
printed in March, 1857. It appeared the same
year in an enlarged form in Miiller's Archiv,
with the title The Tissues of the Craw-fish.
On March 7th he received his medical degree,
Ehrenberg, the great authority on the infusoria,
presiding. In the customary way the young doctor
had to announce and defend several theses. One
of them is rather amusing in view of later events.
He most vigorously contested the possibility of
" spontaneous generation." The meaning of the
phrase is that somewhere or at some time a living
thing, animal or plant, has arisen, not in the form
of a seed or germ or sprout from a parent living
thing, but as a direct development out of dead,
inorganic matter. Haeckel had not made a
personal study of the subject. What he said in
his thesis was merely a faithful repetition of
Miiller's opinion. At that time it was believed
78 HAECKEL
that science had empirically disproved spontaneous
generation. An old popular belief held that fleas
and lice were born every day from non-living dirt
and dust, but that had been refuted long before.
No egg, no animal: every living thing develops
from an egg. This had been laid down as a fixed
rule. When the microscope revealed an endless
number of tiny creatures in every drop of stagnant
water, in the air and the dust and the soil,
it was a question whether the rule was not
wrong. Surely these simplest of all living things,
apparently, were born by spontaneous generation ?
However, the question was believed to have been
settled in two ways. Schwann, the co-discoverer
of the cell-theory, had made certain experiments
which seem to prove directly that even these tiny
beings, the infusoria and bacteria, were never
formed in a vessel containing water and dead
matter, if it had been carefully assured beforehand
that the minute living germs of these animals that
floated in the air could not penetrate into the vessel.
At the same time Ehrenberg and others stoutly
denied that the infusoria were the " simplest "
organisms, or that they could conceivably be born
in that way. They declared that the infusoria
were "perfect organisms" in spite of their small-
ness. The belief that these tiny creatures consisted
of " one cell," and so formed, as it were, the
ultimate elements of the plant and animal worlds
on the lines of the cell-theory, was seriously
menaced, and apparently on the way to be destroyed.
Finally, the tapeworm and similar parasites had
AT THE UNIVERSITY 79
been declared to evolve by a kind of spontaneous
generation from the contents of the intestines.
But this also was proved to be untrue. Thus
there was ample material for a solid dogma : there
was no such thing as spontaneous generation.
The dogma, moreover, harmonised with the pre-
vailing belief in a special vital force and a radical
distinction between the living and the dead, which
was still shared in a subtle form by even a man
like Miiller. The dogma was formulated. Spon-
taneous generation was struck out of the scientific
vocabulary as unscientific and a popular super-
stition. The young doctor, duly initiated into these
ideas of the time, could not resist the temptation
to give his own kick to the fallen theory. Yet
how strangely things have changed since then !
Two years afterwards Haeckel ceased to believe
in a special vital force ; he was now absolutely
convinced that there were unicellular beings ; his
whole theory of life seemed to demand spontaneous
generation as a postulate, and he even doubted
the force of the experiments of Schwann and
others. Haeckel himself became the keenest
apostle of the theory of spontaneous generation.
Whenever it is mentioned to-day, we think of the
weight of his name which he has cast in the scale
in its favour. So the leaves change even in the
forest of science : yesterday green, to-day red and
falling, to-morrow green once more. On the same
branch as the dogmas we find the correctives
growing, that will at length split them open and
cast them as empty husks to the ground.
80 HAECKEL
The history of Haeckel's medical doctorate can
be written in a few plain and touching lines. After
receiving his degree he was sent by his prudent
father, to keep him away from crabs and other
monsters of the deep, to Vienna for a term, to do
hospital work under Oppolzer, Skoda, Hebra, and
Siegmund. All that we find recorded of this term
is that his old love of botany revived in earnest.
Immense quantities of dwarf Alpine plants were
collected. When the traveller passed by the spot
twenty-four years afterwards on a quiet autumn
Sunday, on his way to take ship at Trieste for the
tropical forests and giant trees of Ceylon, the
memory of Schneeberg and the Rose-Alp came
upon him like a dream. However, the hospital
work, together with a short span of cramming in
the winter at Berlin, must have had some effect,
as he passed the State-examination in medicine.
In March, 1858, he was a " practising physician."
He had in his hand the crown of prudent ambition
and he felt like a poor captive. There was one
source of consolation Johannes Miiller. While
one was near him there was a possibility of more
real work. He discussed with him the plan of
the study of the development of the gregarinae
(parasitic protozoa), which he wanted to conduct
in Muller's laboratory in the summer of 1858.
Then he was stricken, like so many others, with
the thunderbolt of the news of Miiller's sudden
death, on April 28th of the same year. What
must he do now? He began to practise. It is
said on his own authority that he fixed the hours
AT THE UNIVERSITY 81
of consultation from five to six in the morning !
The result was that during a whole year of this
philanthropic occupation he had only three patients,
not one of whom died under his earnest attention.
" This success was enough for my dear father,"
says Haeckel. We can well believe it.
The kindly old man consented to one more year
of quite extravagant study, in which all was to
come right. It was to be a year of travel, in Italy.
He was to devote himself to the study of marine
animals, not merely for pleasure, but earnestly
enough for him to find a basis for his life in the
result. This he succeeded in doing. Like the
children of fortune, who at the very moment when
they cannot see a step before them make a move
that the Philistine regards as the safest and last
refuge, Haeckel becomes engaged that very year to
his cousin, Anna Sethe. After that, in January,
1859, he goes down to the coast. He makes for
the blue Mediterranean, which he already knows
will prove anything but an " unprofitable sea" for
him. He will conjure up treasures of science from
its crystal depths with his Miiller-net ; then on
to fortune, position, marriage, and the future. The
fates have added a world-wide repute, if they have
denied many a comfort.
CHAPTER III
THE BADIOLAEIA
IN the January of 1859 Haeckel, then in his
twenty-fifth year, came to Italy with the
determination "to do it thoroughly." By the
autumn the body of the peninsula had been covered
down to Naples, Capri, and Ischia. The winter,
until April, 1860, was spent at Messina.
There are plenty of very strenuous students,
later Privy Councillors as well as archaeologists
and zoologists, who find a year in Italy a very
simple matter. They arrive, make the due round
of sights, and then at once disappear into some
library or institute, burying themselves like moles
in some special work or other, just as they would
do at home. The only time you can see them is
over their Munich beer in the evening; and if
there are a number of them together they smoke
their cigars and sing a German student's song, as
they would do at home. These good folk have very
diSerent dispositions behind their goggles, but they
have never been lit up by the fire of Goethe. They
are quite content to write home like the churlish
Herder ; Italy is pretty enough in Goethe's writings,
THE RADIOLARIA 83
but one ought not to go there oneself. The
modern scholar of this type may add that the
cigars are bad and beer dear. Very different was
Haeckel's verdict. " In Sicily I was nearly thrown
out of my line and made a landscape-painter."
The assthetic man in him was the first to lift up
his arms with vigour under this new, free, inspiring
sun. His words are no idle phrase. The moment
he tried it Haeckel discovered that he had a genuis
for landscape-painting. Even in regard to this
gift we see the truth of what I have already said
in other connections ; the sternest materialists and
scientific revolutionaries of the nineteenth century
were men of considerable artistic power. There
was the solid Vogt, a painter and poet ; Moleschott,
the soul-comrade of Hermann Hettner; Strauss,
who wrote some poems of great and lasting beauty ;
Feuerbach, and others. Even Biichner, the boldest
and most advanced of them all, has written poetry
under a pseudonym.* Darwin took only two
books with him in the little cabin of his ship,
Lyell's Geology and Paradise Lost. There is a
complete gallery of fine water-colours in Haeckel's
house to-day that have been brought from three
quarters of the globe. His son Walter has in-
herited the artistic gift, and become a painter. It
might be said that a good landscape-painter would
hardly recompense us for the loss of the philosopher
* Biichner's brother tells how, when Ludwig furtively
brought to him the manuscript of Force and Matter, he at once
guessed it was a romance or an epic that so much secret work
had been expended on. [Trans.]
84 HAECKEL
and scientist that Haeckel became in the nine-
teenth century. The simple steel pen, the inspired
pencil of the thinker, did more for humanity in his
hand than could have been done by the most
splendid colour-symphonies of the most inspired
landscape-painter. I have often thought this as I
looked over, in the evening at Haeckel's house, the
then unpublished treasures of his artistic faculty.
A work like his History of Creation has counted
for a stratum in the thought of humanity. What
are even the masterpieces of a Hildebrandt in
comparison with it ! Yet there was undoubtedly the
note of genius in these drawings ; some of them
showed more than Hildebrandt 's cleverness (we
know to-day that Hildebrandt's highly coloured
pictures did not even approximate to the real
natural light of southern scenes) and glow of
colour. It seemed to me that here again the man
had dreams of a lost love : a dream of the gay,
wandering pittore, who asks nothing but a sunset
in violet, carmine, and gold, instead of being the
sober unriddlerof the world's problems. Since that
time the house of Fr. Eugen Kohler, to which we
owe the fine new edition of Naumann's classic
work on birds, with its coloured plates, has under-
taken to publish Haeckel's water-colours, as
" Travel Pictures," in a splendid and monu-
mental work.
During the year in Italy all these gifts were
employed together. Italy was exactly the land for
Haeckel's temperament, with its mixture of lofty
classic elements and natural beauty and simple,
THE RADIOLARIA 85
nai've unpretentiousness. For the first time he
felt that he was a cosmopolitan student. He had
never been a devotee of the student's beer-feasts.
He had no need of alcoholic stimulant. Gegen-
baur of Wiirtzburg, the insatiable smoker, once
said to him in joke, "If you would only smoke,
we might make something out of you." It was
done, in any case. His personal inclinations were
in his favour : an illimitable love of travel, good
spirits that rose in proportion to the absurdity of
his accommodation, and a simple delight in every-
thing human that enabled him to talk and travel
with the humblest as if they were his equals. He
spent a night with a young worker in a haystack,
and when he was asked what he was, he pointed
to his paint-box and brush : " House-painter."
"I thought so when I saw you," said the youth,
and he asked Haeckel to start a workshop together
with him. Italy was the ideal land for a visitor
of that type. There was no part of the world
from which he was so pleased to receive re-
cognition in his years of fame as Italy ; and he
received it in abundance, for the appreciation
was mutual.
I will add a page here that was supplied for the
present work by a friendly hand, a man who is as
well known to thousands as Haeckel himself
Hermann Allmers, "the poet of the fens, chief of
Frisia, and splendid fellow," as Haeckel has called
him. He died in the spring of 1902 at an advanced
age. He met Haeckel in Italy, and tells the story
in his verse and prose. Forty years after their
86 HAECKEL
meeting he wrote me that Haeckel was u the finest
man he ever met."
"TO ERNST HAECKEL.
Dost thou remember the magic night,
A night I never cease to see,
That brought us both to Ischia?
How smooth the boat sailed gently in,
How silent was the great broad bay
Unutterably noble and sublime,
In all its star-lit loveliness,
As sky and sea met in embrace.
With fairy-light the waters gleamed
As helm ploughed gently through the wave,
And overhead a deep red glow
Vesuvius from its larva poured.
We were yet strangers at the time,
One hour alone had each the other seen,
Yet something urged us both to speak
To speak, anon, from heart's great deeps.
To speak of all we held of worth,
All that had led us to the spot,
All the fair gifts of happy fate,
And the untoward accidents of life;
Of distant home, of fatherland,
Of the full days of beauty's quest.
Hand clasped in hand we told our joy:
Need I recall it from the mist?
In fine of thy dear love thou told'st
And sacred silence fell on thee.
On moved the barque with leisured pace
Across the deeper silence of the bay.
Behind us vanished Posilippo
And Baja's gulf and Cape Miseno.
As Procida passed slowly by
The gentle dawn stole o'er the night,
THE RADIOLARIA 87
And Epomeo's head was lit,
With the first rays of new-born sun,
And Ischia, nobler than our dreams,
Uprose before our wondering eyes.
Above, mantled in its own loveliness,
Calling us sweetly from the bay
Up to its gentle, vine-clothed heights,
Sat radiant Casamicciola.
How thou and I the glad days spent
Thou knowest well. And now?
Now all is ruin and decay,
A ghastly tomb. We'll let it rest.
Think rather of the linked lives
We spent, and the whole joy of earth,
That never more will gladden us
While sun and stars gleam overhead.
What was it opened then our hearts ?
What was it forged the golden chain?
It was thou know'st it well, comrade
The sailing on that magic night."
" Yes, dear reader, whenever I let these verses
and their splendid truth vibrate again in my soul
and how often and how gladly I do it ! I have
to say, Such days thou shalt never know again
such happy entrance into another's heart. And
what a heart it was that bared itself to me with all
it hid and would soon reveal I We were in a cafe
at Naples, a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung lying
between him and me. It was in the best part of
the spring of 1859. We both reached for it, and
told our names, and the friendship was begun.
'You must excuse me,' Haeckel said, 'I have to
go to Ischia to-night by the market-boat.' ' To
Ischia ? That's good : I am going there myself.
88 HAECKEL
' I am very glad, because I heard I was to be alone.
It starts at nine o'clock/ That was all that had
passed between us before the crossing. What I
have described in the above verses only began
when we, the only Germans on board, made our-
selves comfortable on the open deck. Before the
journey was over we were intimate friends, and
have remained friends in joy and sorrow to this
moment, though the mental differences between
us are enormous. However, Casamicciola brought
us together in a wonderful way. We had common
quarters, and always went out together for walks
or botanising ; we were never separated when we
painted or drew, as Haeckel did with real passion.
On the third morning, when we found some rare
thermal plants in an almost broiling meadow and
discovered nearly at the same spot the ruins of an
ancient Roman bath, the remarkable coincidence
affected us so much that we embraced each other
joyously and dedicated the rest of our flask to them.
We both felt that we could not do otherwise. So
we pleasantly enjoyed the magnificent scene that
lay at our feet from the height of Epomeo. We
stripped off nearly the whole of our clothes, and
dipped, in almost primitive nakedness, in the warm
muddy streams that shot up out of the dark depths
under a growth of tendrils and ferns. We shouted
out, ' How fine it is in these warm and beauti-
fully shaded brooks ! How delightful it must be in
the ravines of Atlas! We must go there/ We
spent more than a whole day in the most marvel-
lous ravines of Atlas, though neither of us had
THE RADIOLARIA 89
the least idea of them. But we determined to
make the journey there, and sketched it out in
detail, to be undertaken as soon as we left Italy.
He contracted a perfect fever for travelling. We
were four weeks in Pagano's excellent inn at Capri
with a few artists, and he completely lost himself
with delight. He became intimate with the
young artists ; being hitherto surrounded by men
of scientific interests, he had avoided them. The
intermediary between Haeckel and them was
myself. I liked no one better than genial artists.
Now Haeckel was seized with a passion for painting
landscapes day after day. He was especially
interested in the most fantastically shaped rocks.
On the other hand, he neglected his marine
animals, and did not return to them entirely
until he got to Messina, where he devoted him-
self to the radiolaria, which were destined to play
so important a part in his work. Darwin, who was
soon to dominate his whole thought, had little
significance for him at that time, as the struggle
for life had not yet been discovered. We rarely
spoke of it, but talked constantly of Johannes
Miiller. He was Haeckel's ideal, as long as I
kept in touch with him. He also spoke often and
generously of his university friends, Dr. W. D.
Focke, who was his special botanical comrade, Dr.
Dreyer and Dr. Strube, who were his chief friends
at the university at Wiirtzburg. The ordinary
life and pleasures of the student, and their heavy
beer-drinking, were a torture to him ; he avoided
them as much as possible. Very often I could
90 HAECKEL
not understand how it was that I brought him
to the highest pitch of gaiety, whereas on all his
earlier travels, especially when botany was still
his favourite science, he would, after the common
meal, withdraw quietly with his books and plants
to the solitude of his own room. Yet he could
be the gayest of all. In fact, his hearty and
wonderful laugh, in all notes up to the very
highest, rings over and over again in the memory
of any man who has once heard it ; it is the frank
laughter of a glad human heart. And whoever has
seen the deep earnestness with which the great
scientist threw himself into the study of the
most arduous problems would be astounded to
hear it."
The Strait of Messina is the pearl of Italy. In
my opinion it is finer than Naples. The huge
volcano and the deep blue strip of water, that
seems to be confined between the white coasts like
some fabulous giant-stream, give a feeling of
sublimity beside which the Bay of Naples seems
but an idyll in the memory. The colours are
more vivid ; you think you would catch hold of the
blue bodily if you put your hand in the water.
It is a land of ancient myths. The Cyclops
hammer their work in Etna. Scylla and Charybdis
lurk in the Strait. Once, in the days of Homer,
when the sun of civilisation still lay on a corner of
Asia, a dim Miinchhausen-world was lived here,
such as we find to-day in the heart of Africa or
New Guinea. But times changed. Zoologists
THE EADIOLARIA 91
came and fished with Miiller-nets for tiny trans-
parent sea-creatures in the gentle periodic
currents, that may once have given rise to the
legend of Scylla and Charybdis. There is no place
more favourable for the purpose than the harbour
of Messina. The basin is open only at one spot,
towards the north. The westerly wind is cut
oS from the town by the mountains, and can do
no harm. Even the detested southern wind, the
sirocco, that lashes the Strait till it is white
with foam, cannot enter. There is only the
north wind that drives the water into the
basin. The waves it brings in are full of millions
of sea-animals, which accumulate in the cul-de-
sac of the harbour. In fact, if the sirocco has
previously been blowing in the Strait and
gathered great swarms of animals from the
southern parts at the mouth of the harbour, and
then the north wind drives them all inside, the
whole of the water seems to be alive with them. If
you dip a glass in it, you do not get water, but
a sort of " animal stew," the living things making
up more of the bulk than the fluid little crystal-
line creatures, medusae, salpae, Crustacea, vermalia,
and others of many kinds.
It was at this classic spot that Haeckel would
lay the foundation of his fame as a zoologist, by
the study of a group of minute creatures that
appealed equally to the aesthetic sense by the
mysterious beauty of their forms. There can be
little doubt that we can see in this, not only a fortu-
nate accident, but also the play of some hidden
92 HAECKEL
affinity. In such a spot the artist in Haeckel
could compromise with the zoologist. His aesthetic
nature had revelled in landscape, peasantry, and
song. Now the Miiller-net and the microscope
revealed a new world of hidden beauty that none
had appreciated before him. In devoting himself
to it he was still half engrossed in his quest of
beauty; but the other half of him was rapidly
attaining a mastery of serious zoology.
It is a common belief that aesthetic appreciation
ceases as soon as we sit down to the microscope.
There is the magnificent blue Strait of Messina.
Your eye, embracing its whole length, drinks in
its beauty in deep draughts. What will your
microscope make of it ? Its field can only take
in a single drop of water, and this does not grow
more blue when you thus analyse it. Let science
go further afield : this is the land of beauty. All
those doctrines of histology, embryology, and so
on, built on the microscope, are thought to be
poles removed from aesthetic enjoyment. They
dissolve everything man's soft, white skin, the
perfumed leaf of the rose, the bright wing of the
butterfly into " cells. ' It is mere ignorance to
talk in this way. Nature's beauty is by no means
so thin a covering that the microscope must
at once pierce through it. Bather does it reveal
to us in incalculable wealth a whole firmament
of new stars, a new world of beauties, if we
choose the right way to see them. Haeckel
did choose the right way.
At his very first dips into the harbour of
THE KADIOLARIA 93
Messina, in October, 1859, he got certain curious
lumps and strips of jelly. The local fishermen
called them ovi di mare (sea-eggs). It was, in
fact, natural enough to regard these inert creatures
as strings of mollusc-eggs, when their real nature
was unknown. But our young student already
knew what they were. They were social radio-
laria.
The word "radiolarium," from radius (a ray),
means a raying or radiating animal. It is diffi-
cult for the inexpert to imagine the structure
of one of these creatures. He must first put
entirely on one side all the features that he
usually associates with an " animal." The radio-
larian lives, moves, has sensations, breathes, eats,
and reproduces, but in a totally different way
from that we are accustomed to see. Its body
consists essentially of a particle of homogeneous
living matter. There is merely a firmer nucleus
in the centre of it, and the soft gelatinous matter
is thickened at the surface to form a kind of
capsule. Otherwise there is no trace of any
real " organ." The little blob of .jelly eats
but it has no stomach; it eats with its whole
body, its soft, jelly-like substance closing entirely
over particles of food and absorbing them. It
breathes (with the animal type of respiration)
but it has neither lungs nor gills; the whole
body takes in oxygen and gives off carbonic acid.
It swims about yet it has neither legs nor fins ;
the pulpy mass of its body flows, when it is
necessary, into a crown of streamers or loose pro-
94 HAECKBL
cesses, that keep the body neatly balanced ; when
they are no longer required, they sink back into
the gelatinous mass. We study the " histology"
of these curious social-living creatures under a
powerful microscope. As I have explained, the
tissues and organs of the higher animals break
up under the microscope into a most ingeniously
constructed network of tiny living gelatinous
corpuscles with a nucleus in the centre the cells.
But our radiolarian has no more got tissues
composed of cells than it has stomach or lungs
or any other organ. It is merely a single cell
with a nucleus and a jelly-like body. Yet in
this case the single cell is a whole individual,
a complete animal, that lives, moves, eats,
breathes, and so on. The radiolarian is, in com-
parison with the splendid cell-tapestry of the
higher animals, a poor little atom of life. It
must be put deep down in the animal series.
What a vast distance ! Above is man, built of
myriads of cells woven into the most ingenious
tissues and the most perfect organs for each
function of life; below we have the radiolarian,
in which a single cell must discharge all the
vital functions, because its whole body is merely
one cell. But there is another wonder. This
tiny particle of living slime, floating in the blue
waves at Messina, hardly more visible than a
drop of spittle, has a most remarkable quality.
It is able to assimilate a kind of matter that
the chemist calls silicious (flinty) matter the
stuff that forms, when it is crystallised in chemical
A RADIOLARIAN.
(Lychnaspis miranda.)
To f nee p. 94.
THE RADIOLARIA 95
purity, the well-known rock-crystal. This flint
matter (and sometimes a similar substance) is
then exuded again by the radiolarian no one
knows quite how from its gelatinous body, and
built into so beautiful a form that even a child
will clap its hands and cry, " How lovely ! " when
it sees it through the microscope. We may put
it that the radiolarian forms a coat of mail for
itself from this siliceous matter : we may at
the same time call it a float or buoy. The hard
flinty structure serves to keep it balanced when
it is swimming, just as when a loose piece of
jelly attaches itself to a cork disk. Thus a round
trellis-work shell is formed about the animal,
and through the apertures it thrusts gelatinous
processes that act as oars, and can be put forth
or drawn in at will ; outside this shell, again, may
be all sorts of structures, such as zigzag shaped
rods, radiating stars, bundles of streamers, and
so on. It is a most wonderful sight. It is as
if each class of these beings had its private taste,
and, in virtue of a kind of tradition, built a dif-
ferent type of flinty skeleton from all the others.
Here begins the peculiar artistic wizardry of these
tiny and lowly creatures, that lifts them at once
high up in the scale of animated natural objects
with a great display of beauty. We find every
possible variation of ornament within the limits
of the particular type : an infinite number of
crystalline and superb variations on the theme
of trellis-work, stars, radiating shields, crosses,
and halberds. They give an impression at once
96 HAECKEL
of human art-work, for there is nothing else in the
whole of nature with which we may compare them.
The radiolarian, therefore, is an animal of the
utmost simplicity of bodily frame that, by some
force or other, creates the highest and most
varied beauty that we find anywhere in nature,
living or dead, below the level of human art.
Haeckel's good genius brought him to these radio-
laria. Until the winter of 1859-1860 he knew very
little about them. When a radiolarian dies its
soft body naturally [melts away and perishes.
But the art-work of its life, the star or shield of
flinty matter, remains ; it either sinks to the bottom
or is washed ashore, where numbers of them may
accumulate. If a pinch of mud or sand from the
shore is put under the microscope the observer will
see lovely artistic fragments, and ask what is the
meaning of the miracle. Ehrenberg, the venerable
Berlin microscopist, was the first to have the ex-
perience. He was not in the habit of going to the
sea himself, but had specimens sent to him, and
found in them shells of the radiolaria. Though
they were so small, their artistic quality seemed
to him to be so great that he assumed they
were built by very advanced animals of the star-
fish or sea-urchin type. That there were uni-
cellular protozoa with a simple gelatinous body
and no higher organs he stoutly denied, and he
had the support of his leading contemporaries
everywhere. But his colleague, Johannes Miiller,
who fished in the sea himself, came across living
specimens in the Mediterranean in the first half
THE RADIOLARIA 97
of the fifties. It appeared that they were really
very lowly animals at least. Miiller christened
them the radiolaria, classified the fifty species
that he discovered, and at his death left the
subject well prepared for the first student who
should go more fully into it. His final work on
them did not appear until after his death, in
1858, the sunset-glow of his brilliant scientific
career. Perhaps he would have gone more deeply
into the mysteries he had encountered but for a
curious accident. Just as he discovered the sub-
ject, two years before his death, he had a terrible
experience. The ship in which he was returning
from a holiday in Norway was wrecked. A
favourite pupil of his was drowned, and he himself
narrowly escaped by swimming to land. After that
he could not be induced to enter a boat during his
last trips to the sea, and so the thorough study of
these most graceful inhabitants of the Mediter-
ranean was abandoned. But when Haeckel fished
at Villefranche with Kolliker of Wiirtzburg, and
Miiller was at Nice, he was urged by the master, as
a kind of testamentary injunction, that " something
might be done " with the radiolaria. And when he
fished up a pretty crown of socially-united radio-
laria on first rowing over the Messina harbour, ho
thought it would be a grateful offering to the
memory of the dead hero of his zoological dreams
to continue the study of the radiolaria. At once
he seemed to enter the treasure-house of a fairy
tale. When the campaign was ended in the Mes-
sina harbour in April, 1860, he had discovered no
7
98 HAECKEL
less than 144 new species, and each species proved
a fresh master of decorative art. At the same
time he studied the nature of the gelatinous body.
Ehrenberg's theory was destroyed for ever. Grant-
ing that there were certain difficulties (since
explained away) in the way of admitting the exist-
ence of real unicellular creatures, he at all events
gathered an enormous amount of new and helpful
information as to the nature of these soft, almost
organless beings and of the slimy living matter
(called sarcode or protoplasm) of which they were
composed. His mind matured rapidly in these
quiet days at Messina, while his aesthetic nature
was plunged in admiration of the beauty of the
siliceous coats. The last scruple with regard to
the old story of creation fell from him like the
covering of a pupa. If a naked bit of slime like
the radiolarian could form from its body this
glorious artistic structure, why may not man also,
as he paints his pictures under the glow of Italy's
colour, be merely a natural being, of like texture to
the radiolarian ? And if this radiolarian had in its
life built up the crystalline, rhythmic structure, why
may there not be merely a difference of degree, not
of kind, between the " dead " crystal and the
" living " radiolarian ?
In May, 1860, Haeckel returned from Messina
to Berlin. He brought with him splendid draw-
ings of the perishable body of his treasures,
numbers of prepared specimens, and whole bottles
full of their imperishable shells. On the 17th of
September, 1860, he made the first communi-
THE RADIOLARIA 99
cation of his discoveries to his colleagues in the
zoological section of the Scientific Congress at
Konigsberg. Virchow was amongst his admiring
audience. On the 13th and the 20th of December
in the same year Peters read a short account in
the Berlin Academy of Science that drew more
general attention. He set to work on a fine
monograph, with splendid plates and with all his
conclusions in the text. Before it was finished,
however, he had a number of personal experiences
and changes of mind. Gegenbaur had in the
meantime been appointed Professor of Anatomy
at Jena. Before he started for Italy, Haeckel
had visited his friend at Jena during the cele-
bration of the third centenary of the university.
"We spent a very happy time there," Haeckel
wrote afterwards, "enjoying the beautiful pros-
pect (from the heights of the Saale valley) and
the Thuringian beef-sausages." Now there were
more serious things to discuss. Gegenbaur 's lot
had once seemed to him a kind of model. Now
a part of it was fulfilled : he had been to Messina.
Meantime Gegenbaur had advanced a station.
Haeckel wanted to follow him, and get a position
at Jena. There was no such thing as a pro-
fessorship of zoology or a zoological institute
there, but all that might nay, must be changed
some day. What Gegenbaur was doing left
plenty of room for another chair to be set up.
And to be with his best friend !
In March, 1861, Haeckel completed the Disser-
tatio pro venia legendi at Jena that he had
100 HAECKEL
quickly decided on. It dealt, of course, with
his new field: the limit and the system of the
animal group to which the radiolaria belonged,
the rhizopods. He was immediately appointed
private teacher at Jena, and found himself in
the lovely valley of the Saale, beneath the moun-
tain about whose summit the red rays lingered.
He had been drawn from Berlin to Messina to
find a home a home for ever in the increasing
stress.
In the following year, 1862, the official position
of Extraordinary Professor of Zoology was created,
and this brought him close, even externally, to
Gegenbaur. Everything was, it is true, in a
very primitive condition at first. In August he
married Anna Sethe a sunny dream of fresh
young happiness. In the same year he published
his Monograph on the Radiolaria, a huge folio
volume with thirty-five remarkably good copper-
plates, such as our more rational but slighter
technical methods no longer dare produce. Wa-
genschieber, of Berlin, the last of the fine scien-
tific copper etchers, had been in constant personal
touch with Haeckel, and reproduced his original
drawings in masterly style. With this work
Haeckel was fully established in his position as
a professional zoologist. It is still one of the
finest monographs that was issued in the nine-
teenth century ; from the literary point of view,
also, it was one of the purest and most lucid
works of its kind, full of great and earnest
thoughts, and without any bitterness a work,
THE RADIOLARIA 101
perhaps, that Haeckel has not since equalled. The
most influential and official scientists of the time
had to respect this work : possibly with the sole
exception of the aged Ehrenberg, to whom it dealt
a deadly blow in this department, without, of
course, undervaluing his great antecedent services.
He never even studied it sufficiently to be able to
quote the title of it correctly.
Nevertheless, a flame broke out at one spot in
this monograph. In a very short time HaeckePs
whole figure would stand out in the red reflection
of its glow a figure really great, solitary, suddenly
deserted by all the bewigged and powdered
professors Haeckel himself, as the world has
come to know him.
CHAPTER IV
DAEWIN
~Y~TTE still celebrate, at a distance of centuries,
VV the return of the birthday of great
men. In reality it is a mistake. We ought to
celebrate the hour when not merely life, but the
idea of their life, quickened them. That is the
really important birth that calls for commemo-
ration. Luther's real birthday was when he
nailed his theses to the church door. Then was
born the Luther that belongs to the world. Over
the world-cradle of Columbus shines, not the
trivial and evanescent planet given in his horo-
scope, but the little red flickering star of Guana-
hani, the light that he saw from the shore on the
night before he landed on an island of the New
World.
Life is a voyage of discovery to the man who
passes through it. He looks out with his child-
eyes and discovers the world at the bottom,
discovers only himself. But one day a greater
veil is torn from before his self. Genius, the
greater I, stirs within him like the butterfly in
its narrow pupa-case. For the world at large
103
DARWIN 103
that is the hour when the great man is born
who will leave his mark on it.
Haeckel's biography only begins on a certain
day, if we look at it rightly and broadly. Until
that day he is merely a young man, an outgrowth
from a rich old civilisation : a young man who
has felt in him a struggle between artistic and
scientific tendencies, like so many : who has
vacillated between the choice of a " paying pro-
fession " and research for its own sake, and has
decided for the former, like so many : who has
chosen zoology, and begun to work hard on
professional lines at his science : and who has
been told prophetically that he will one day do
something, though along a line where much has
been done already. In the whole of this develop-
ment we have as yet no indication of the real
tenor of his life.
It comes first with the name of Darwin. The
arabesque of a very different life begins to blend
with that of his own.
In the February of the year in which Haeckel
was born (1834), twenty-eight years before the
point we have arrived at, Charles Darwin was
on a scientific expedition to South America. There
is a romantic element in the earlier story of this
journey. The naked Fuegians had stolen a boat
from an English Government ship that was en-
gaged in making geographical measurements,
towards the close of the twenties, on the wild
coast of Tierra del Fuego. FitzEoy, the captain,
arrested a few of the natives, brought them on
104 HAECKEL
board as hostages, and in the end took them with
him to England. They were to be instructed
in morality and Christianity and then taken back
to their people, in order to introduce these elements
of civilisation, for the advantage of shipwrecked
sailors or distressed travellers who might fall in
with them. We feel a breath of the spirit of
Rousseau in it. As a fact nothing came of the
device. The good Fuegians were clothed and
improved by civilised folk for a year or two,
returned home, immediately abandoned their
trousers and their Christianity, and remained
naked savages. But the bringing home of these
hostages led, in the early thirties, to a new
expedition of FitzRoy to Tierra del Fuego. The
Government directed him to draw up further
charts, and he looked about for a man of science
to accompany him.
The man proved to be Charles Darwin, then
in his twenty-second year.
The son of a prosperous provincial physician,
he had begun to study medicine without much
success, and was transferred to theology, only
to find after three years of study that he was
as little fitted to become a country clergyman
as a country doctor. He had an unconquerable
love of scientific investigation. He collected all
kinds of things, and desired to travel, without
any very clear idea of his destiny. A chance
introduction came to the young man as a god-
send, and he joined FitzEoy's expedition to
South America. Once more, it was this journey
DARWIN 105
that made him " Darwin," the mighty intellectual
force in the nineteenth century.
Darwin found an idea in South America. You
have to examine it very closely to appreciate it
clearly. Let us recapitulate very briefly the
hundred years of zoology and botany that had
gone before.
In the eighteenth century Linne drew up, for the
first time, a great catalogue of plant and animal
species. Bach species had a solid Latin name,
and was provided with its particular label, by
which every representative of the species could
be recognised at once. Then the species were
bracketed together in larger groups, and a general
system was formed. It was an immense scientific
advance, and is still generally appreciated as such.
But we have to make one reserve. It is not man
that separates things ; nature, or rather God who
created nature, has already distinguished them.
In this respect zoology and botany are of God.
The various species of plants and animals are some-
thing firmly established by God. Take the polar
bear, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or a particular
species of palm, or vine, or rose. There they are,
and all that man has to do is to learn their
specific characters in order to determine and
name them.
Behind all this we really have the ancient idea
of the Mosaic story of creation. God made the
animals and plants, species by species, put them in
their places, and said to man, "Name them as
you think fit, classify them, putting the like to-
106 HAECKEL
gether and separating the unlike." So God spake
to Adam when he stood before him, naked as a
Fuegian. Linne comes on the scene some six
thousand years afterwards to set about this naming
and arranging in earnest. But that does not make
much difference. There are the species created by
God. They have ceaselessly reproduced them-
selves since the days of Paradise according to the
command to increase and multiply, each one in its
own kind, so that the polar bear has only begotten
polar bears, the giraffe giraffes, the hippopotamus
hippopotami. Thus, in spite of death, the primitive
Paradise is still there, and Linne, the official pro-
fessor at Upsala, with his venerable wig and
embroidered coat, can take up the work of the
naked Adam with a good conscience, and finish
what the patriarch had not been able to do.
Linn6 died in 1778 (about the time when Goethe
was beginning the Iphigenia and Wilhelm Meister)
in the full fame of all these achievements and all
his hypotheses from the giraffe to God. Fifty
years elapsed between this and Darwin's voyage ;
but in those fifty years the following process is
accomplished :
An increasing number of bones and other relics
of animal species, that exist no longer, were dug
out of the earth. In South America the skeleton
was found of a giant-sloth, the megatherium, the
remains of a kind of animal, larger than the
elephant, that no traveller could find living in the
country. The famous mammoth-corpse came to
light in the ice of Siberia; an entirely strange
DARWIN 107
elephant with curved tusks and a red woolly coat.
Ichthyosauri were found in the rocks in England,
and so on. All these " extinct " species had to be
named and arranged in the system. A special
scientific indication was put on them, which
means " extinct. " But this was not enough for
thought which cannot be " entirely dispensed
with,'* as some one well said, even in exact
science.
Where did these extinct species come from ?
What is their relation to the Creator ? Were they
created long ago in Paradise with the others, and
afterwards conveyed in the ark, only to disappear
in the course of time ? And what was the cause
of their disappearance ? Must we conclude that
part of what Adam saw was not available for Linne
and his pupils ? These four remains, a few bones
here and there, do not tell us much about them.
Therefore, species may perish : many of them
have perished.
There was something new in this, something
that obscured the clear lines of earlier science.
However, a way of escape was found. It was
claimed that these grotesque monsters ichthyo-
sauri, megatheria, mammoths, &c. represent an
earlier creation, with which Adam had nothing to
do. Cuvier developed the theory in his grandiose
way in 1812. Before the creation of the animal
and plant species that Adam found in Paradise
there was a long series of periods in the history of
the earth, each of which had its own animal and
plant population. It was in one of these periods
108 HAECKEL
that the forests grew which we find fossilised in our
coal. In another the ichthyosauri, gigantic lizards,
filled the ocean. In a third the hideous mega-
therium dragged along its huge frame, and so on.
It is true that there is nothing in the Bible about
these ancient and extinct periods ; but the Mosaic
verses move quickly they press on to come to man.
The repeated creations of the animal and plant
worlds are summed up in a single one. We must
read something between the lines.
Apart from that, everything is clear. Hence
the ancient species were made fixed, solid, and
unchangeable by God just like the later species
that Adam found in Paradise, and that still exist.
Without the will of God they could no more have
died out than the actual ones ; and there were no
human beings there to destroy them. But the
divine action intervened. At the end of each of
these old-world periods a terrible spectacle
was witnessed. The heavens poured out their
punishing floods ; the seas were heated to steam
by fiery masses of rock that were summoned by the
divine power from the bowels of the earth. In
the course of a single day the carboniferous forests
were swallowed up; the megatheria disappeared,
legs uppermost, like flies in butter, in the sand
dunes of the terrible floods.
The might of the creative act was equalled by
the might of the destruction. The science of these
vast new creations and divine revolutions before
Adam's birth was called geology. It lived in peace
with Linne's theory of fixed species. Its parent,
DARWIN 109
Guvier, was so great a genius that it seemed quite
impossible that he had made a mistake. Before
twenty years were out he was, in the opinion of
a contemporary and equally able geologist, declared
to be certainly wrong on one point.
Lyell wrote a magnificent work in which he
proved, from the point of view of scientific geology,
that the whole story of these terrible revolutions
was a fiction. There are no such sharp sections in
the early history of the earth. Everything goes
to show that throughout the whole period of the
earth's development the same natural laws have
been at work as we find to-day. It is true that the
relative positions of sea and land, hill and valley,
forest and desert, have often changed ; but very,
very slowly, in the course of millions of years. A
single drop of water, constantly falling, will hollow
out a stone. In these millions of years the water
has swept away rocks here, and formed new land
by the accumulation of sand there. In these
millions of years the sand has been compressed
into the gigantic masses that tower above us to-day
as sandstone mountains ; they are formed of sand
that was originally laid like mud, layer by layer, on
the floor of the ocean.
It was all very plausible ; it seemed to picture
an eternal flow of things in which there was no
room for God. The changes in the earth's surface
were easily brought about without catastrophes, in
the course of incalculable ages. God was excluded
from geological discussions of the formation of hill
and dale. And when it was fully realised, it
110 HAECKEL
brought the question of species to the front once
more.
It was impossible to retreat simply to Linne's
position. Lyell by no means denied Cuvier's
various periods in the earth's development as such.
He believed, moreover, that the plant and animal
populations were different in these epochs. When
the forests flourished which have formed the mass
of our coal-measures there were no ichthyosauri ;
when the ichthyosauri came there were no longer
any carboniferous forests ; with the ichthyosauri
there were no megatheria, and the last ichthyo-
saurus was extinct before the megatheria arrived.
All that Lyell rejected was the great divine cata-
strophes. But when these were abandoned, it was
no longer possible to attribute the " end " of the
extinct species to a divine act. We were faced
with the slow and natural conversion of terrestrial
things in the course of endless ages.
Species must have been liable to be destroyed
by purely natural causes. The catastrophes were
abandoned, yet species had been destroyed. And
when that was granted it was the devil's little
finger a further conclusion was inevitable. If
species have died out slowly and naturally in
the history of the earth, and new species have
made their appearance at the same time, may not
these new species have arisen slowly and naturally ?
Suppose these simple and purely natural causes,
that had brought about the extinction of certain
species, had been for others the very starting-point
of development ? In one word : if the extinction
DARWIN 111
was not due to a mighty divine interference, was it
not conceivable that the origin also may not have
needed such?
One more deduction, and the demon of know-
ledge had hold of the entire hand. May not this
natural extinction and natural new-birth have been
directly connected in many cases ? As a fact,
some of the species had been wholly extirpated.
But others had provided the living material of
the new arrivals ; they had been transformed into
these apparently new species. That was the
decisive deduction. It did away with the need
of any sudden creation. It merely made a claim
that was appalling to the Linnean principles :
namely, that species may change. In the course
of time and at a favourable spot one species may
be transformed into another.
Another fairly obvious deduction could be made.
Who brought about the transformation ? Lyell
proved that, without any catastrophes, terrestrial
things are constantly changing the water and the
land, the mountains and the valleys, and even the
climate. In this gradual change the environments
of living things were at length altered to such an
extent that they were bound to cause a change
in the organisms. However, different species
reacted in different ways. Some gradually died
out. Others adapted themselves to the new
conditions ; just as, in human affairs, one race
breaks down under changed conditions while
another rises to a higher and richer and new
stage on that very account. No creation ! Merely
112 HAECKEL
transformations of species, development of new
forms from older ones by adaptation to new,
naturally modified conditions. Even zoology and
botany were without the finger of God from the
earliest days.
Of course there was no trace of these latter
deductions in Lyell. But they pressed themselves
with an irresistible and decisive force on the mind
of one of his first readers, Darwin.
He took Lyell's book with him to South
America. Step by step the logic of it forced him
to admit that this was what must have taken place
somewhere. First the idea of " extinct species "
became a concrete picture to him there, a sort of
diabolic vision. The whole substratum of the pam-
pas is one colossal tomb of strange monsters. The
bones lie bare at every outcrop. Megatheria, or
giant-sloths, as large as elephants, and with thigh-
bones three times as thick as that of the elephant,
able to break o2 branches in the primitive forests
with their paws : armadilloes as big as rhinoceroses,
with coats as hard as stone and curved like
barrels; gigantic llamas, the macrouchenias,
compared with which the modern specimens are
Liliputians ; mastodons and wild horses, of which
America was entirely free even in the days of
Columbus, and lion-like carnivores with terrible
sabre-teeth. There they all are to-day extinct,
lost, buried in the deserted cemetery of the
pampas-loam.
When the young Darwin stood by these groves,
like Hamlet, he did not know how closely this
DARWIN 113
ghost-world came to our own day. At that time
the armour of the gigantic armadillo, the glyptodon,
that had formed shelters over the heads of the
human dwellers in the pampas, like Esquimaux
huts, had not yet been discovered. The cave of
Ultima Esperanza in Patagonia had not been
searched, and no one had seen the red-haired coat
of the sloth as large as an ox, the grypotherium
(a relative of the real megatherium), cut by some
prehistoric human hand, amongst a heap, several
yards deep, of the animal's manure in such pecu-
liar circumstances as to prompt the suggestion that
the giant-sloths had been kept tame in the cavern,
as in a cyclopean stable, by prehistoric Indians.
Darwin thought the remains were very old, though
this by no means lessened the inspiration.
As our geological Hamlet speculated over these
bones of extinct monsters, the ideas of Linn6 and
Guvier struggled fiercely in his mind with the
new, heretical ideas inspired by Lyell. How was
it that these ancient, extinct animal forms of
America resembled in every detail and in the most
marked characteristics certain living American
animals ? Before him were the relics of past
sloths, armadilloes, and giant-llamas. In the actual
America, also, there were sloths, armadilloes, and
llamas, though with some difference. And no-
where else on earth, either in past or present
time, were there sloths, armadilloes, and llamas.
Cuvier had replied, God had pleased to create
those ancient megatheria, glyptodons, and ma-
crouchenias of America. Then, one day, he sent
8
114 HAECKEL
his destructive catastrophe, and swept them all
away, as a sponge goes over the table. Then,
in the empty land, he created afresh the sloths,
armadilloes, and llamas of to-day. But why had
God made the new animals so like the old that the
modern zoologist has to class the megatherium in
the same narrow group as the actual sloth, the
ancient glyptodon with the modern armadillo, and
so on?
Darwin, who had studied theology, was unshaken
with regard to God himself. However, something
occurred that occurs so often and with such good
result in the history of thought. It appeared to
him that the notion of a direct creation is by no
means the simplest way of explaining things, but
the most puzzling and complicated. Darwin
believed in Lyell. There had been no destructive
catastrophe at all to sweep away the megatherium
and its companions. They had disappeared
gradually, by natural means. Was it not much
more rational to suppose that the actual sloths and
armadilloes came into being gradually, by natural
means ? Part of the old animal population had
not perished, but been transformed into the actual
species. There was a bond of relationship be-
tween the past and the present. One or other
grotesque and perhaps helpless giant form may
have completely disappeared in the course of time.
But the golden thread of life was never entirely
broken. Other and more fortunate species had
preserved the type of the sloth, the armadillo, and
the llama ; they had developed naturally into the
DARWIN 115
living animals of America. God might remain at
the groundwork of things. He had launched
matter into space, and impressed natural laws on
it. But these sufficed for the further work. They
created America. They developed the mammal
into the sloth and the armadillo in the days of
the megatherium and the glyptodon. They main-
tained these types in the country, in a straight
line of development ; the progressive principle of
life bringing about the extinction of certain forms,
and transforming others by a more fitting adapta-
tion to their environment.
Darwin always looked back on this first conflict
of his ideas in presence of the dead shells and
bones of the ancient pampas animals as an hour
of awakening. It was the birth of his humanity in
the higher sense. It is of interest to us because it
coincides exactly with the date of Haeckel's birth
in the ordinary sense.
In Darwin's fine account of his voyage, which is
mostly arranged in the form of a diary, we find a
passage written on the east coast of Patagonia on
January 9, 1834, and the next on April 13th. In
the meantime the ship had made a short zigzag
course, which is spoken of in another connection.
But the interval between the two dates is taken
up with a passage on these gigantic animals, the
reasons for their extinction and the striking fact
of their bodily resemblance to the living animals of
South America. " This remarkable resemblance,"
we read, " bet ween the dead and the living animals
of one and the same continent will yet, I doubt
116 HAECKEL
not, throw more light on the appearance of organic
beings on the earth than any other class of facts."
This is clearly a summary of Darwin's deepest
thoughts at the time. Haeckel was born on
February 16th of the same year, 1834. Thus the
bodily birth of one of the two men whom we
conceive to-day as Dioscuri coincides with the
spiritual rebirth of the other. But it would be
nearly thirty years before they would meet in spirit
never to part again. At the very beginning of
their acquaintance Darwin wrote a letter to Haeckel
(October 8, 1864) in which he speaks of the earliest
suggestions of his theory. The Hamlet-hour comes
back vividly to his memory. " I shall never forget
my astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece
of armour, like that of a living armadillo. As I
reflected on these facts and compared others of a
like nature, it seemed to me probable that closely
related species may have descended from a common
ancestor."
However we take it, Darwin then saw for the
first time that his difficulty about the mutability
of species was from the first, in his own mind, a
difficulty about God. He began his doubts with
the ancient armadillo ; he ended with God.
On the return journey from South America, which
amounted to a circumnavigation of the globe, the
struggle was renewed at the Galapagos islands.
Volcanic forces had raised these islands from the
bed of the ocean in comparatively recent times.
They were, therefore, bound to be a virgin province
at the time. Now, however, the walls of the crater
DARWIN 117
were clothed with vegetation, birds flew after insects,
and gigantic turtles and lizards lived on the shores.
Whence did these plants and animals come ?
Darwin examines them. They have an unusual
appearance, and seem to point to America. Yet
not a single species is now wholly American ; each
has ^its peculiarities. An historical controversy
arises over the islands, and men range themselves
in parties once more. Empty islands emerge from
the blue waters. How are they to be populated ?
There are two possibilities. One is that God
has created the animals and plants Galapagos
animals and plants. But in that case why has he
created them entirely on the American model,
while diverging from it in small details ? The
second possibility is that the animals and plants
were brought by the current or the wind from the
neighbouring American coast; they are American
plants and animals. After landing on the islands,
they adapted themselves to their new surroundings,
and were altered. Hence both the resemblance
and the difference. The theory assumes, of course,
that species are mutable. If that is so, we can
explain everything without God.
But the greatest and tensest struggle began
when Darwin returned home. He approached the
most audacious, but most striking fact, for his pur-
pose. Up to this the question had been whether
new species were produced by God or by natural
necessity. Now a third element was introduced,
man himself. He also alters species, as a breeder
of pigeons, rabbits, sheep. He has done it with
118 HAECKEL
success for ages only the Linnes and Cuviers
had not noticed the fact. How does he accom-
plish it?
A breeder desires to give his sheep finer wool.
He examines the wool of a thousand sheep. The
difference between them is so slight that it is of
no practical consequence. But the farmer selects
the male sheep out of the thousand that has the
best quality of wool, and the corresponding female.
He crosses the two. Their young have wool of
a slightly improved quality, and he picks out the
best amongst them once more for crossing. He
continues this through several generations. At
last, with his continuous selection and crossing,
the quality of the wool increases so much that
any one can recognise it at once, and it has a
distinct cultural value. In this way improved
races of animals and large numbers of fine flowers
have been produced by breeders : by artificial
selection of the fittest to reproduce in each genera-
tion. This was done by man not by God, not
by nature in remote times, but under our very
eyes, by man.
Now for an analogous process without man.
Let our sheep live wild in any country. No
human breeder has any interest in them : God
does not seem to interfere with them. They live
on and on, for thousands of years, generation after
generation. Here again, in the wild state, we find
the same slight variations in the quality of the
wool. One sheep has a thicker coat than another.
For thousands of years the fact is without signifi-
DARWIN 119
cance. Then occurs a slow change of the envi-
ronment. The climate becomes colder. Perhaps
an ice-age sets in, such as our earth seems to have
passed through many times. There are two alter-
natives. A very hard winter may set in at once
and all the sheep perish, because their woolly coat
is too thin in all cases. That would mean the
extinction of a whole species. But the severe
cold may come on gradually. The winters are
more trying. So many sheep perish in the first
winters ; but so many others survive. Which will
survive ? Naturally, those that happened to have
the thicker coats. Those alone live on to the
spring, and reproduce. The following year the coat
is thicker all round, as the lambs all came from
relatively thick-coated parents. The winter
decimates them again, and the thickest coated
survive once more, and so on. The pressure of
external conditions, the " struggle for life," selects
just as man does. Only the best adapted indivi-
duals survive and reproduce.
The whole earth is a vast field of splendid
adaptations. The tree-frogs are green because
only green frogs are preserved ; all the others are
destroyed. The arctic hare is white on the snow,
the desert-fox yellow. For a thousand reasons
in the course of the earth's development these
backgrounds white, yellow, green ; snow, desert,
forest, &c. have themselves been constantly
changing under the action of Lyell's changes in
the crust of the earth. Hence constantly fresh
adaptations, with a certain percentage of complete
120 HAECKEL
extinctions. In these ceaseless new adaptations we
see a picture of an eternal progressive development.
Always a finer selection : always better material :
natural things always selecting and being selected.
Man is superfluous in this world-old, eternal pro-
cess. And G-od, too, is superfluous.
That was Darwin's last and decisive thought.
Divine action was excluded from the whole pro-
vince of animal and plant species. It does not
matter whether or no the shrewd idea of natural
selection solves the whole problem. Why speak
of " whole," when all problems are really un-
fathomable ? He left open the question of the
origin of the first slight variations, the first increase
in the fineness or thickness of the sheep's wool, for
instance. He left open the question of the inner
nature of the process and a good deal more. But
these things did not affect the great issue.
What Darwin did was to show for the first
time how we might conceive the natural evolu-
tion of species; to suggest that the miracle of
the purposive adaptation of organisms to their
environment could be explained by purely natural
causes without introducing teleological and super-
natural agencies to bring the disharmony into
harmony. The older mind and logic had seen the
action of God everywhere ; the new thought and
logic were gradually restricting his sphere. Dar-
win took away a whole province from the teleolo-
gist when he merely set up the idea of selection.
He towered above himseli in that moment.
Natural philosophy wrested zoology and botany
DARWIN 121
from the hands of Linn6 and Cuvier. It destroyed
the old idea of a design in the interest of natural
law and the general unity of nature. " Allah need
create no more." We cannot emphasise it too
much : it was the conceivability that settled the
question. Darwin had shown that "it might
have been so," and this possibility stood for the
first time in zoology and botany opposed, with all
the weight of logic, to the other theory, which was
no more understood, but was supplied by imagina-
tion to fill a gap the idea of a special creation
of each animal species, the idea that the green
tree-frog, had been created amongst the foliage
just as he was. The feebler fancy gave way to
the better. In this concession lay whole sciences
that would have to be entirely transformed on the
strength of Darwin's achievement.
Narrow-minded folk have tried to make light
of the mere "possibility," creating a distinction
between truth and logical theory. As if all truth
were not solely in the human mind! What an
age can conceive is true to that age. There is
nothing higher in the bounds of time and the
development in which we are involved. All truth
and science began for humanity in the form of
possibilities. Copernicus's theory was only a
possibility when it first came. All that we call
human culture has come of the putting together
of thousands upon thousands of these possibilities,
like so many stones. It is no use raising up
against it the figment of " absolute truth." The
main point was that Darwin raised the conceiv-
122 HAECKEL
ability of a natural origin of species by the modifica-
tion of older foims, which were driven ceaselessly
to new adaptations under the stress of the struggle
for life, to such a pitch that the older possibility
of a creation of each species and its deliberate
adaptation by supernatural action sank lower and
lower. It was a pure conflict of ideas ; the greater
overcame the smaller now smaller.
Darwin's work, the Origin of Species, was pub-
lished on November 24, 1859, after twenty-five
years of study. He kept the theory of selection
to himself for more than twenty years. The
whole of the young generation from the beginning
of the thirties, to which Haeckel belonged, grew
up without any suspicion of it. Apart from the
constant ill-health that hindered his work, Darwin
was tortured with anxiety lest he should be treated
as an imaginative dilettante with his heretical
ideas. In the scientific circles of the middle of the
century one was apt to be disdainfully put down
as a windy " natural philosopher " if one spoke
of " the evolution of animal and plant species"
and the like. The word had become the scare-
crow of the exact, professional scientific workers ;
much as when commercial men exclaim, " Dear
me, the man's a poet." Hence Darwin wanted
to provide a most solid foundation of research for
his work, and then to smuggle it into the house
like a goblin in a jar.
He took his task so seriously that, as Lyell
afterwards wrote to him, he might have worked
on until his hundredth year without ever being
DARWIN 123
ready in the sense he wished. Chance had to
intervene, and bring forward one of the younger
men, who almost robbed him of the title of
discoverer. Wallace arrived independently at the
idea of selection, and he was within a hair's
breadth of being the first to publish it. The aged
scholar at Down had to come forward. Then the
great book was published, and Wallace disappeared
in its shadow.
In Darwin's opinion it was only a preliminary
extract, and he added many supplementary
volumes as time went on. As a fact it was so
severely elaborated that even the thoughtful
layman, possibly with a sympathy for the idea,
was almost, if not wholly, unable to digest the
proofs. It had to be " translated" for the majority
of Darwin's educated countrymen. On the other
hand, this mass of facts was partly strange and
new to the professional biologists. What did so
many of the museum-zoologists know, for instance,
of the results and problems of the practical breeder ?
"That belongs to the province of my colleague
who teaches agriculture, not to mine." His
proofs were taken indiscriminately from zoology,
botany, and geology. But at that time it was woe
to the man that mixed up the various branches
of research. The professor of zoology could not
control the botanical material, and vice versa.
There was, in addition, the general dislike of the
natural-philosophical nucleus. It was impossible
to suppose that this very individual book, trans-
gressing every rule, should at once meet with
wide encouragement, or even ordinary appreciation.
124 HAECKEL
In England Darwin's repute as a traveller and
geologist, and the personal respect felt for him, had
some effect. Then came a small circle of friends,
Hooker, Huxley, even, to some extent, the aged
Lyell, who had seen the manuscript before pub-
lication, and had at once started a more or less
brisk propaganda. In the first six months three
editions of the work were sold, so that it was read
by a few thousand men. As a rule there was at
that time less dread of " natural philosophy " in
England than elsewhere. But pious minds were
alarmed at the " struggle against God " that was
based on the exact data of zoology, botany, and
geology.
Darwin had made that the salient point, as a
glance at the work shows, since he closes with
a reference to the Deity. He said it was a
" grand " view of the Creator to suppose that
he had created only the first forms of life on the
earth, and then left it to natural laws to develop
these germs into the various species of animals
and plants. It was prudent to restrict the theistic
conflict. God was merely excluded from the origin
of species. Natural selection did not apply to the
further problem of the origin of the primitive
life-forms and of life itself. Theism could retain
them. There was something soothing psycho-
logically in the phrase, which was often attacked
subsequently, and did not represent Darwin's
later views. It was characteristic of Darwin's
gentle disposition.
He did not start out from the position that God
DARWIN 125
does not exist, and that we must, at all costs,
seek natural causes for the origin of things. He
had not abandoned the idea of the clerical pro-
fession because he had lost belief in God, but
because he had more attraction for catching
butterflies and shooting birds. Still a firm theist,
he had been convinced, as a candid geologist,
by Lyell's demonstration that God had had
nothing to do with the moulding of hill and
valley or the distribution of land and water. As
a candid zoologist and botanist he had then con-
vinced himself that the analogous changes in
the animal and plant worlds had needed no divine
intervention.
As yet, however, he saw no reason to draw more
radical conclusions. He sought, as far as honour
permitted, a certain peace of thought by asking
whether this indirect action of the personal Ruler
over such vast provinces did not enhance the
idea of him instead of detracting from it.
Goethe would have been prepared, on his
principles, to recognise the step taken in the
direction of natural law as a victory for our in-
creasing knowledge of and reverence for the Deity.
For him a natural law was the will of God ; if
natural selection created species, he would have
seen merely the will of God in selection. But
Darwin had not yet advanced so far, and still
less could this be expected in his pious readers.
However, we find a curious confession a few
paragraphs before the theistic conclusion of the
book. It runs: "Light will be thrown on the
126 HAECKEL
origin and history of humanity. " Light, that is to
say, from the theory of the transformation of species
by natural selection. The words contained the
promise of a new twilight of the gods. In the
innocent days, when the Creator stood in person
behind each species of animal and plant, Linne had
seen no great innovation in his denning man as
a definite species, the highest species of mammal.
God had created the polar bear and the hippo-
potamus, Genesis said, as well as man. That man
had transgressed the command in Paradise, fallen
into sin, needed salvation, and so on, was another
matter altogether. With Darwin the innovation
was incalculably important.
On his theory the various species of animals
had been developed from each other, without
a new creative act. If man was an animal species
in this sense, he also must have originated from
other animals ; and that would be bitter. The
phrase shows that Darwin already saw clearly,
and had abandoned his belief in a special creation
of man. But this point was bound to make more
bad blood than all the rest put together. God,
now restricted to the direct production of the first
living things, had lost man as well as the animals.
Moreover, whatever interpretation was put upon
the Mosaic narrative, the very source of theistic
belief, the Bible, was called into question. How
had we come to know of this story of divine
creations ? By the Bible, the vehicle of revelation.
But this Bible was the work of man, and man was
nowfwell wifrbiR the bounds of nature, from which
DARWIN 127
God had been excluded. How could he learn any-
thing from revelation? The biblical writers had
clearly only made conjectures. Some of them
with regard to Adam, for instance were certainly
incorrect. There was nothing in the Bible about
evolution by means of selection. Indeed, was not
the whole picture of a creating Deity an error ?
These thoughts were bound to press upon the
religious mind with all their logical force. When
they did so, the very foundations of theology
became insecure, to a far more serious extent than
Darwin's moderate conclusion suggested. When
the book fell on this contentious ground, it was
bound, even if it were only read in the last two
pages, to provoke vast waves of hostility against
its heretical zoology and botany, especially in
England.
Haeckel was in Italy when the work the work
of his life, too, as the sequel shows was published.
We have seen where he was : in sight of the blue
sea, penetrating for the first time into a special
section of zoology, the radiolaria, and making
it his own. He was far from theorising, for the
first years of reality were upon him. He returned
to Berlin at the beginning of May, 1860, bringing
his study of the radiolaria, and resolved to publish
it in comprehensive form. Here he learned for
the first time that a " mad " work by Darwin
had appeared, that denied the venerable Linnean
dogma of the immutability of species.
German official science was now invaded from
128 HAECKEL
two sides at once. Haeckel had returned like a
new man from the freshness of Italy; and Darwin's
work, translated by Bronn, was bringing some
slight extract of the English student's thoughts,
like a draught of old golden wine. They were
bound to meet this time.
The aged Bronn, a German naturalist of distinc-
tion and merit, had found the Origin of Species
interesting enough, at least, to deserve the trouble
of translation. But his interest in it was very
restricted. He was one of the thoughtful students
of the days following Cuvier, and was not of the
kind to pin his faith to one man. The appearance
of the plant and animal species in the various
terrestrial periods, so sharply separated by Cuvier
himself, showed unmistakably an ascent from
lower to higher forms. The fish is placed lower in
the system than the mammal. At a certain period
there were fishes living, but no mammals as yet.
At another period the only plants on the earth were
of the decidedly lower group of the cryptogams
(ferns, shore-grasses, club-mosses), and these were
succeeded by pines and palm-ferns, and finally by
the true palms and foliage-trees. Cuvier's theory
of creation had to take account of this. Agassiz,
who held firmly to the fresh creation of species in
each new epoch, conceived the Creator as an artist
who improved in his work in the course of time.
Each new achievement was better than the pre-
ceding. It was rather a curious idea of the
Creator !
Others, who did not venture to use the idea of
PHOTOGRAPH OF MARBLE BUST BY G. HEROLD.
To face p. 128.
r u e ',
DARWIN 129
Deity quite so naively as Agassiz in zoology and
botany, conceived a "law of development " within
life itself. It was a time when belief in a "vital
force " was universal. Living things had their
peculiar force, which was not found in lifeless
things. The life-principle might be at work in the
law of development. It would raise living things
higher and higher in the succeeding geological
epochs. It was a vague theory, though it purported
to cover not only the fact but the machinery of
development. In the course of ages it brought
about the appearance of new species. Those who
held this idea of an immanent law of evolution
rejected the older notion of a personal Deity,
putting in an appearance suddenly at the beginning
of the secondary period and creating the ichthyo-
sauri " out of nothing." They looked upon
Cuvier's catastrophes, to which Agassiz still clung,
with a touch of Lyell's scepticism. The "law
of evolution " had been the deus ex machina of
the long procession of life-forms. One day a fish
ceased to give birth to little fishes in the manner
of its parents. The "law of evolution" was at
work in its ova, and suddenly little ichthyosauri
were developed from them. Thus, again, a lizard
was believed to have engendered young mammals
one day. One student would hold that the tran-
sition was quite abrupt in this sense. Another
would think it more gradual, and approach the
idea of a slow transformation of a fish into a
lizard, and a lizard into a mammal, or a tree-fern
into a palm-fern, and this into a true palm. At
130 HAECKEL
the bottom they were all agreed that the whole
inner law of evolution had nothing whatever in
common with the other laws of nature and was
not subordinate to them. They did not hold an
evolution in harmony with the great mechanism
of natural laws. Their principle got astride of
natural laws at certain points, like a little man,
and turned them in this or that direction.
Very little philosophic reflection was needed to
show that they had merely replaced the Creator with
a word. The older Dualism remained. On one side
was the raw material of the world with the ordinary
natural laws ; on the other side a lord and master,
the law of evolution, playing with the laws as it
pleased, and moulding the material into new life-
forms in an advancing series. It is true that they
no longer pictured to themselves a venerable being
with a white beard creating the ichthyosauri,
but the finger of God remained in the law of
evolution, attenuated into a special and spectral
form. The God that acted from without was
banished, but the " impulse from within," reduced
to a mere skeleton in substance, was put upon the
throne.
The advocates of the law of evolution had
assuredly done much in preparing the way for
Darwin, as they had insisted that certain advances
in detail were undeniable and built up theories from
the chaotic material provided by special research
especially seeing that some of the ablest naturalists
of the time were amongst them, who determined
to retain speculation in zoology and botany. But,
DARWIN 131
on the other hand, it cannot be questioned that
the confused nature of their fundamental idea,
which, in fact, was not far removed from the theo-
logical notion of the vital force, gave the rigid and
" exact " academic workers an apparent right to
reject all speculation on the possibility of an evolu-
tion of species as an unscientific dream. The aged
Bronn was in 1860 one of the most prudent and
sober of the advocates of the inner principle of
evolution. He candidly acknowledged that Darwin
had struck a severe blow at the great idea of his
life, on one side at least. Darwin's work not
merely dismissed God to the wings as a personality,
but even left no room for the finger of God, for his
spiritual writing on the walls of the living world.
It found evidence of natural laws alone. From
them came, if not life itself, at all events selec-
tion, adaptation, and evolution by virtue of this
increasing adaptation the higher advance that
converted the fish into a lizard and the lizard into
a mammal. The fine old worker, with an age of
indefatigable labour behind him, though he had
not got beyond the idea of a "law of evolution,"
looked on Darwin with a mixture of fear and
admiration as he cut into the very heart of these
problems. He added amiable notes to the work
to the effect that one would like to go so far, but
the distance was intimidating. In fact, he omitted
altogether from his translation the very important
phrase that " light would be thrown on the origin
of man." It would be a terrible aSair, he thought,
if the discussion were at once turned on this.
132 HAECKEL
Man himself owing his origin neither to God nor
the finger of God, but to natural selection in the
ordinary course of natural laws ! It was not to be
thought of. Hence the phrase was struck out, as
quite too extravagant, in his otherwise admirable
work.
Bronn had himself become something of a
revolutionary amongst his colleagues by the
translation. The rigidly " exact " workers crossed
themselves before the Germanised work. Most of
the " evolutionists " in the older sense had by no
means the bonhomie to speak even of a " possi-
bility " like the patriarch Bronn. From the first
Darwin was Haeckel was the first to experi-
ence it branded with the anathemas of the two
opposite schools of science in Germany. On the
one hand the rigorous and exact workers declared
that his teaching was pure metaphysics, because
it sought to prove evolution and contemplated
vast ideal connections. On the other hand the
Dualist metaphysicians denounced him as an
empiric of the worst character, who sought to
replace the great ideal elements in the world by
a few miserable natural necessities. It is
significant to find that Schopenhauer, the brilliant
thinker, regarded the Origin of Species as one of
the empirical soapsud or barber books produced
by exact investigation, which he thoroughly
despised from his metaphysical point of view.
And there were already (there are more to-day)
whole schools of zoology and botany that looked
upon Darwin's theoretical explanations as un-
DARWIN 133
scientific " mysticism," " metaphysics/' and "phi-
losophy in the worst sense of the word."
Haeckel read the dangerous book at Berlin in
May, 1860. " It profoundly moved me," he writes
to me, " at the first reading. But as all the
Berlin magnates (with the single exception of
Alexander Braun) were against it, I could make
no headway in my defence of it. I did not
breathe freely until I visited Gegenbaur at Jena
(June, 1860) ; my long conversations with him
finally confirmed my conviction of the truth of
Darwinism or transformism."
It was, therefore, in the critical days imme-
diately before or during the negotiations with
Gegenbaur which led to his setting up as a
private teacher at Jena. The names of Darwin
and Jena unite chronologically in Haeckel's life
two great names that were to bear him into the
very depths of his career, and that have their roots
in the same hour.
We may ask what it was in the book that
" profoundly moved" the young student of the
radiolaria. The name of Braun only partly
explains the matter, as Braun was an evolutionist
of the same type as Bronn. He was amiably
disposed to meet it, but did not openly enter on
the new path. We must go deeper. We then
understand it clearly enough, if we recollect
Haeckel's bent in the last few years.
He had no longer any scruples with regard to
religion. The God of tradition had been entirely
replaced in him by Goethe's God, who did not
134 HAECKEL
stand outside of, but was one with, nature.
" There is nothing within, nothing without : for
what is within is without." There was not a
kernel, God, and a shell, Nature. " Nature has
neither kernel nor shell : it is both together."
The years spent in southern Italy had certainly
helped to bring out as strongly as possible the
contrast between Goethe's conception and the
conventional idea of God as an extramundane
Creator. No surroundings are more apt to do
this than the Eomance peoples of the Mediter-
ranean. In the northern, Protestant countries the
ecclesiastical tradition of Deity has always a
spiritual element, a kind of vague resolution into
moral laws, that in some measure approach
natural law, though one made by man. There is
no trace of this in Naples and Sicily. The super-
natural there is the saint, the madonna ; they
penetrate unceasingly into the natural reality, in
every little detail of life and conduct. The
antithesis of the poor cosmic machinery and the
ever-present heavenly help and supersession of it
is raised to a supreme height in the popular belief.
Miracles are not relegated to earlier days and
ancient books. They are expected, affirmed, and
believed every day. The saint fills the net of the
fisherman as he chases the edible cuttle-fishes by
torchlight. The saint makes the storm that
threatens the boat makes it suddenly out of
nothing. The madonna can arrest in a second
the glowing stream of lava that rolls towards the
village from Vesuvius, and if hundreds of them
DARWIN 135
unite in ardent prayer and the making of vows,
she will be appeased and do it. Every hair on a
man's head is twofold ; there is the natural hair
and a hair that can at any moment be changed,
transformed, annihilated, or created afresh from
nothing, by divine power. The man who has
lived in this atmosphere of practical Dualism for
years must be saturated to his innermost being
with a feeling of the absolute contradiction
between this conception of God and nature and
Goethe's philosophy. If he is to follow Goethe,
this ancient extramundane, ever-interfering Deity
must be given up without the least attempt at
compromise.
Thus Haeckel's position was incomparably more
radical than Darwin's from the very first. He no
longer believed in a Creator, either in whole or
part.
He asked himself, therefore, how he could now
explain certain things in nature. He had learned
from the great Johannes Miiller that species were
unchangeable, and it was impossible to conceive
the spontaneous generation of the living from the
dead. The essence, the predominant element
of the living thing was the mysterious, purposive
" vital force." The first of these three ideas of
the master's to be surrendered entirely by him was
the vital force. Even in Miiller's lifetime, and in
his own laboratory, so to say, his pupil, Du Bois-
Eeymond, made the first great breach in the
doctrine with his famous study of animal
electricity, a really pioneer piece of work, especially
136 HAECKEL
as regards method, at that time. It was now
more than ever probable that there was no more a
special vital force besides the simple natural forces
than there was a God distinct from nature. The
animal or the plant was a wonderful outcome of
the same laws that had built the crystal or the
globe. The sharp distinction between living and
dead matter fell into the waste-basket, where so
many other Dualistic tags lay, cut off by the
shears of science.
But if one of Miiller's theses was abandoned,
another was retained as a real blessing with all the
more tenacity by his pupils the thesis that even
the scientific investigator shall always " think "
nay, even " philosophise. " Miiller called it " using
one's imagination," in his desire to emphasise it.
Now it was certainly a fair philosophic deduction
from Du Bois-Reymond's discoveries that one
ought no longer to be so rigid as regards the
possibility of spontaneous generation. If the
same natural forces are at work in the organic
and the inorganic, the living and the dead, it is
no longer inconceivable theoretically that life and
inorganic matter only differ in degree, not in kind.
The distinction might become so slender either
now, or at least in past times that an apparent
" spontaneous generation " might really take place.
Here again, it is plain, Haeckel had a greater
freedom than Darwin. Working gradually from
above, Darwin desisted when he came to spon-
taneous generation, and left room for God.
Haeckel came into an open field, believing that
DARWIN 137
there was no eternal Deity and that spontaneous
generation itself was by no means a forbidding
conception. The problem for him was merely,
how he could work upward through the plants and
animals of all geological periods until he reached
man. He was bound to seek to dispense even
here with the historical vital force, and explain
everything by the great natural laws of the
cosmos.
It was in this frame of mind that he received
Darwin's book. Can it be in the least surprising
that it " profoundly moved " him. It opened out
to him the whole way, just as he desired it.
Miiller's third thesis, the immutability of species,
broke down. But what did it matter? It was
now possible for the first time to construct a
philosophical zoology and botany in Miiller's sense,
without any vital force and without God.
At the same time this rapid and impulsive
acceptance of Darwin's theory was not merely a
decisive moment in Haeckel's intellectual develop-
ment ; it was bound to be, even externally, a most
important step in his career. The theistic con-
troversy was forced on his attention. It passed
out of the province of his inmost life, that had
hitherto only been discussed in conversation with
intimate friends, into the professional work of his
most serious and public occupation into zoology,
into the radiolaria at which he had been working
for years.
We must realise clearly what it must have
meant at that time for a young zoologist, who
138 HAECKEL
wanted to do rigorous professional work and had
quickly decided to settle at Jena in order to begin
his career as an official teacher, to become "a
Darwinian " in conviction and open confession.
It might cost him both his official position and his
scientific future ; and this at the very moment
when he had just secured them, or was in a better
position to secure them. We have here for the
first time the open manifestation of a principle in
Haeckel's life that he had hitherto only used
inwardly, in application to himself. The truth
must be told, whatever it cost. Shoot me dead,
morally, materially, or bodily, as you will : but
you will have to shoot the law first.
Darwin's ominous book had been available in
Bronn's translation for two years. The German
professional zoologists, botanists, and geologists
almost all regarded it as absolute nonsense.
Agassiz, Giebel, Keferstein, and so many others,
laughed until they were red in the face, like a
riotous first-night public that has made up its
mind as to the absurdity of the play from the
first act, and torment the author as the cat
torments a mouse. Then Haeckel gave to the
world his long-prepared Monograph on the Badio-
laria (1862), the work with which he endeavours
to establish in fact, must establish his position
as an exact investigator, even amongst the
academic scholars of the opposite camp. All goes
very smoothly for many pages of the work. A
few traces of heresy may be detected about
page 100. The passage deals with the relation of
DARWIN 139
organ to individual, in connection with the social
species of radiolaria that live in communities. It
is a subject that Haeckel took up with great
vigour later on, as we shall see. Here it affords
him an opportunity to say a word about the
general fusion of things in the world of life, in
opposition to our rigid divisions in classification.
Organ and individual pass into each other without
any fixed limit. That, he says, is only a repetition
of the relation of the plant to the animal. We
cannot establish any fixed limitations between
them. What we set up as such are only man's
abstractions. In nature itself we never find these
subjective abstract ideas of limitation " incor-
porated purely, but always fading away in gradual
transitions ; here, again, the scale of organisation
rises gradually from the simplest to the most
complex, in a continuous development." How-
ever, these are words that might have been written
by Schleiden or Unger or Bronn before Darwin's
time.
Yet there is something in the work that would
have been a jet of ice-cold water to the Agassizs
and Giebels. This brilliant new " Extraordinary
Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoo-
logical Museum at Jena University," as it says
on the title-page, accepts Darwin in a certain
unambiguous passage late in the text.
It is necessary to bring to light once more
this passage, buried in a work that is not easily
accessible, an expensive technical work separated
from us by four decades now. It is worth doing
140 HAECKEL
so, not only on account of the courage it displayed
at the time, but also as a document relating to the
great controversy of the nineteenth century. It is
found on pages 231 and 232, partly in the text,
but for the most part in a note. Immediately
after giving the table of classification Haeckel goes
on to say : " I cannot leave this general account
of the relationship of the various families of the
radiolaria without drawing special attention to the
numerous transitional forms that most intimately
connect the different groups and make it difficult
to separate them in classification, to some extent."
It is interesting to note that in spite of our very
defective knowledge of the radiolaria it is neverthe-
less possible to arrange "a fairly continuous chain of
related forms." He would like to draw particular
attention to this, because " the great theories that
Charles Darwin has lately put forward, in his
Origin of Species in the Plant and Animal World
by Natural Selection, or The Preservation of the
Improved Races in the Struggle for Life, and which
have opened out a new epoch for systematic
biology, have given such importance to the
question of the affinities of organisms and to
proofs of continuous concatenation that even the
smallest contribution towards the further solution
of these problems must be welcome." He then
endeavours in the text, without any more theo-
retical observations, practically to construct a
"genealogical tree of the radiolaria," the first of
a large number of such trees in the future. He
takes as the primitive radiolarian a simple trellis-
DARWIN 141
worked globule with centrifugal radiating needles,
embodied in the Heliosphcera. " At the same
time," he says, characteristically, " this does not
imply in the least that all the radiolaria must
have descended from this primitive form ; I merely
show that, as a matter of fact, all these very
varied forms may be derived from such a common
fundamental type." In other words, once more,
it is conceivable a golden word even long after-
wards. The first " genealogical tree," a " table of
the related families, sub-families, and genera of
the radiolaria," arranged in order from the higher
forms down, and connected with lines and brackets,
comes next. The text deals thoroughly with the
possibility of descent. This closes the first and
general part of the monograph. But there is a
long note at this point in the text, where Darwin's
title is cited, that gives us his first appreciation
of Darwin in detail. It begins : "I cannot refrain
from expressing here the great admiration with
which Darwin's able theory of the origin of species
has inspired me. Especially as this epoch-making
work has for the most part been unfavourably
received by our German professors of science,
and seems in some cases to have been entirely
misunderstood. Darwin himself desires his theory
to be submitted to every possible test, and ' looks
confidently to the young workers who will be
prepared to examine both sides of the question
impartially. Whoever leans to the view that
species are changeable will do a service to science
by a conscientious statement of his conviction;
142 HAECKEL
only in that way can we get rid of the mountain
of prejudice that at present covers the subject.'
I share this view entirely," Haeckel continues,
" and on that account feel that I must express
here my belief in the mutability of species and
the real genealogical relation of all organisms.
Although I hesitate to accept Darwin's views and
hypotheses to the full and to endorse the whole of
his argument, I cannot but admire the earnest,
scientific attempt made in his work to explain all
the phenomena of organic nature on broad and
consistent principles and to substitute an in-
telligible natural law for unintelligible miracles.
There may be more error than truth in Darwin's
theory in its present form, as the first attempt
to deal with the subject. Undeniably important
as are the principles of natural selection, the
struggle for life, the relation of organisms to each
other, the divergence of characters, and all the
other principles employed by Darwin in support of
his theory, it is, nevertheless, quite possible that
there are just as many and important principles
still quite unknown to us that have an equal or
even greater influence on the phenomena of organic
nature. This is the first great attempt to con-
struct a scientific, physiological theory of the
development of organic life and to prove that the
physiological laws and the chemical and physical
forces that rule in nature to-day must also have
been at work in the world of yesterday." Haeckel
then refers to Bronn, the translator of the book.
With Bronn he calls Darwin's theory the fertilised
DARWIN 143
egg from which the truth will gradually develop ;
the pupa from which the long-sought natural law
will emerge. And he concludes: " The chief
defect of the Darwinian theory is that it throws
no light on the origin of the primitive organism
probably a simple cell from which all the others
have descended. When Darwin assumes a special
creative act for this first species, he is not con-
sistent and, I think, not quite sincere. However,
apart from these and other defects, Darwin's
theory has the undying merit of bringing sense
and reason into the whole subject of the relations
of living things. When we remember how every
great reform, every important advance, meets with
a resistance in proportion to the depth of the
prejudices and dogmas it assails, we shall not be
surprised that Darwin's able theory has as yet met
with little but hostility instead of its well-merited
appreciation and test." There is yet no question
of man and his origin. But what he says is very
bold for the time ; and before a year is out we
shall find him drawing the most dangerous con-
clusion of all. And it is found, not in a late page
and note in a stout technical volume, but in
the pitiless glare of the sunlight, in the most
prominent position that could then be given to it
in German scientific culture.
CHAPTEK V
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863
IN the second decade of the nineteenth century,
Oken had inspired the formation of large
public gatherings of German naturalists and
physicians. Oken was one of the advanced
thinkers who felt that all technical science
was in the end only preparatory to the great
work of educating the people. In his opinion
the naturalist, even if he spent his whole life
in investigating the filaments of plants or the
limbs of insects, was a pioneer of culture. In
any case these gatherings were a very good
practical move at the time. In a time of terrible
reaction on all sides a feeling came at last even
to the recluse of science that, besides the technical
value of his work, it ought to do something
towards lifting his fellows out of the rut they
were falling into. They felt that if all ideals
were going to be lost, the ultimate aim of
special research would perish with them. Oken
took up a position of democratic opposition. He
was soon joined by Alexander von Humboldt, who,
with the same feeling at heart, gave the work a
144
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 145
certain polish of scientific and impartial dignity.
There are features of his work that amuse us
to-day, but those were evil days, and every
particle of goodwill had to be appreciated.
However, there was a serious difficulty.
The bolder elements met in congresses, and
encouraged each other in the pursuit of their
ideal. But it at once became clear in their
public discussions that some of their purely
scientific discoveries were dangerous and heretical
in such a period of reaction. This or that had
hitherto been buried innocently in scientific mono-
graphs, quite unknown to the crowd, and the
author might be a royal councillor, receive decora-
tions, and almost be an elder of the Church.
Suddenly, by means of these assemblies, the sin-
fulness of all this lore about snails or insects or
vertebrates was brought to light and put before
the profane public, and there was much anger.
The whole of scientific research was full of secret
plots, heresies, and bombs against God.
There was a most appalling illustration of this
in the Scientific Congress, held in September, 1863.
Nothing is more amusing to-day than to run
through the yellow and almost unknown papers
of the Congress. They are illuminating to some
extent. An idea that belongs to humanity is
openly brought into the debate for the first time.
Ages lie behind this hour. We must grant all
that savours of human comedy, of triviality even,
in such an assembly, but after all we must see
in it the swell and clash of great waves. Haeckel
10
146 HAECKEL
spoke for the first time on Darwin's theory, at a
spot from which the waves were bound to spread
through the whole scientific culture of the land.
Virchow, afterwards his bitter opponent, supported
him. All the deepest questions and consequences
of Darwinism were mooted with the first vibrant
accents. It was a great and unforgettable hour.
The first speaker at the Congress on the Sunday
evening, September 19, 1863, was Haeckel. We
must remember the charm that attached to his
person even outwardly, the direct charm that did
not need any allusion to his growing repute in
zoology. It was the charm that had been felt
by the simple folk of uncultured Italy, who had
never heard even the name of the science. Darwin
was never a handsome man from the aesthetic
point of view. When he wanted to sail with Fitz-
Eoy, it was a very near question whether the
splenetic captain would not reject him because
he did not like his nose. His forehead had so
striking a curve that Lombroso, the expert, could
put him down as having " the idiot-physiognomy "
in his Genius and Insanity. At the time when
he wrote the Origin of Species he had not the
patriarchal beard that is inseparable from his
image in our minds ; he was bald, and his chin
clean shaved. The prematurely bent form of the
invalid could never have had much effect in such
a place, no matter what respect was felt for him.
Haeckel, young and handsome, was an embodi-
ment of the mens sana in corpore sano. He rose
above the grey heads of science, as the type of
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 147
the young, fresh, brilliant generation. It was an
opponent at this Congress, who sharply attacked
the new ideas, that spoke of the " colleague in
the freshness of youth " who had brought forward
the subject. He brought with him the highest
thing that a new idea can associate with : the
breath of a new generation, of a youth that greets
all new ideas with a smiling courage. Behind
this was the thought of Darwin himself, a wave
that swept away all dams.
The speech was as clear as crystal, and is still
useful as an introduction to the Darwinian
question. He at once strikes the greatest and the
dominant note. Darwin means a new philosophy.
All organisms descend from a few primitive forms,
possibly from one ; and man is one of these
organisms. What Darwin had merely hinted in
his concluding passage, what the aged Bronn had
excluded altogether from his translation as too
dangerous, was now set forth emphatically in the
very beginning of his speech. "As regards man*
himself, if we are consistent we must recognise
his immediate ancestors in ape-like mammals ;
earlier still in kangaroo-like marsupials; beyond
these, in the secondary period, in lizard-like
reptiles ; and finally, at a yet earlier stage, the
primary period, in lowly organised fishes."
There is something monumental in this passage,
as in the previous confession of Darwinism in the
Monograph on the Radiolaria. Others may have
come to similar conclusions at the time on reading
Darwin's work. Here we have the profession
148 HAECKEL
made at the psychological moment, a trumpet-
blast that sent its thrilling alarm from the
threshold of a new age, for friend or foe to hear.
The speech gives a slightly exaggerated account
of the struggle that already existed. All was in
confusion. Science was breaking up into two
camps. On the one side evolution and progress,
on the other the creation and immutability of
species. Already there are distinguished leaders
of science in favour of evolution. It is time to
discuss the matter in full publicity and the thing
is done.
There was, let me say parenthetically, on the
Continent at least no question at that time of
this clear division, or even of a serious agitation.
It was partly this speech, together with Haeckel's
next work, that was to bring it about. To the
highest authorities the subject seemed to be below
the level of discussion. We must recall a
passage that the Professor of Zoology at Gottin-
gen, Keferstein, had written a year before in the
Gottinger G-elehrte Anzeiger. " It gives great
satisfaction to the earnest scientific worker," we
read, " to see a man like Agassiz, with an
authority based on the finest zoological works,
reject unreservedly a theory [Darwin's] that
would discredit the whole work of classifiers for
a century, and to see that the views built up by
several generations and the general consent of
humanity hold a stronger position than the views
of a single individual, however eloquently they
may be stated." There is no idea in this of two
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 149
regular camps of scientists. Humanity is adduced
as the one party ; against it stands the anarchist,
trying to blow up the work of centuries, Darwin.
But that gave no concern to the young orator;
he saw a whole decade of success in the first
attack.
He rolled off geology. Cuvier's theory of
catastrophes, Linne's belief in the immutability
of species all a purely theological cosmogony.
The " philosophical theory of evolution " rises
behind it like a Mene Tekel Pharshim.
All living things, including those of past
geological epochs, form one great genealogical tree.
The word, the new leading word for zoology and
botany, comes out with a flash. What is the
system that has been awaited so long ? It is
the genealogical tree of life on our planet. Its
roots lie deep in the remote past. " The thousands
of green leaves on the tree that clothe the younger
and fresher twigs, and differ in their height and
breadth from the trunk, correspond to the living
species of animals and plants ; these are the more
advanced, the further they are removed from the
primeval stem. The withered and faded leaves,
that we see on the older and dead twigs, represent
the many extinct species that dwelt on the earth
in earlier geological ages, and come closer to the
primeval simple stem-form, the more remote they
are from us."
This was the great new idea for science to
work upon. Paleontology, the science of past
life, found at last a common task with botany
150 HAECKEL
and zoology. Haeckel's own programme for
decades was unfolded. This phrase, too, was a
birth-hour. In all the struggle that has followed
as to the " how " of evolution this figure of the
tree with the verdant branches as the new field
of zoological and botanical work, and the withered
branches for the paleontologist, has never been
abandoned. A symbol from the living world itself,
the branching tree, had at last taken a decisive
place in the science and the classification of
living things. With splendid clearness the speech
then enumerates the Darwinian principles : varia-
tion, heredity, the struggle for life, selection, and
adaptation. A vast duration is claimed for the
geological epochs in the sense of Lyell ; and it
is pointed out that there is a progressive advance
of forms throughout these periods. Special stress
is laid on the ever-advancing, ever-uplifting
element in evolution. Man is again introduced
into the subject. He has " evolved " from the
brutality of the animal. Language itself has been
naturally u developed." (What a shrewd per-
spective in such a brief phrase ! How the
philologists would stare !) So the " law of
advance " traverses the whole field of culture. A
fiery passage follows : " Reaction in political,
social, moral, and scientific life, such as the
selfish efforts of priests and despots have brought
about at every period of history," cannot per-
manently hinder this advance. The " advance "
is " a law of nature," and " neither the weapons
of the tyrant nor the anathemas of the priest
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 151
can ever suppress it." We hear again the older
Sethe thundering his intrepid reply: " You will
have to shoot the law first."
At the close he glances briefly at the difficulties
the theory presents. We must regard even the
first beginnings of life as the outcome of
" evolution." Naturally. Darwin's God has no
use for this prophet. But how shall we conceive
it ? Was the thing that first developed from the
inorganic " a simple cell, such a being as those
that now exist in such numbers as independent
beings on the ambiguous frontier of the animal
and vegetal worlds ? " Or was it a particle of
plasm merely, " like certain amoeboid organisms
that do not seem to have attained yet the
organisation of a cell " ? Again the simple
question contained a whole programme.
Schleiden had first shown in 1838 that the
body of any plant can be dissolved into tiny
living corpuscles, which he called " cells," because
they often had the appearance of a filled honey-
comb. A year later Schwann proved, in Johannes
Miiller's laboratory, that the higher animal also
is a product of these cells. The cell was re-
cognised as the living unit that composed the
oak and the rose, the elephant and the worm.
Man himself, in fine, was but a pyramid of these
cells or, to speak more accurately (as each cell
has its own life), an immense community of cells,
a cell-state.
Virchow had, as we saw, laid the greate^o stress
on this last and most important deduction from
152 HAECKEL
the cell-theory a short time before. He looked
upon every individual man as a mysterious plurality
a plurality of cells. Pathology, the science of
disease, must take account of this. Health was
the harmonious co-operation of the cell-state ;
disease was the falling-away of some of the cells
to special work that injured or destroyed the whole
community. This conception had inaugurated a
new epoch in medicine, making it a consciously
ministering art in the service of the living human
natural organism. The Darwinian had now the
task of showing the validity of this conception in
his own province. The genealogical tree of the
animals and plants must at once be drawn up in the
form of a genealogical tree of the cell. The cells had
combined to form higher and higher communities,
and each higher species of animal or plant was in
reality one of these social constructions. But this
complexity was only found in the upper branches.
The lower we descend, the simpler we find
organisms. The lowest forms of life represent
cruder, simpler, and more primitive cell-structures.
And the final conclusion was that all the cell-
communities or states must have been evolved
from unattached individuals whose whole body
consisted of a single cell. We cannot strictly call
these lowest forms of life either animals or plants ;
they can only be likened to the single cell.
Though Haeckel himself did not know it at the
time, all his [pretty radiolaria at Messina belonged
to this category. The whole swarm of bacilli and
bacteria fell into this world of the "unicellulars."
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 153
Haeckel's words threw a brilliant light on the
question. Not only the simplest forms of life are
unicellulars ; the primitive forms also were. With
them began the colossal genealogical tree that
branches out through the millions of years of the
earth's history. If anything on the earth has
arisen by spontaneous generation out of dead
matter, at the commencement of all life, it must
have been a cell, or a still simpler particle of
living plasm more or less resembling one. It is
true that the point is put in the form of a question ;
but the veil has been torn away. Given one cell,
the whole genealogical tree grows on, in virtue of
Darwin's laws, until it reaches its highest point
in man.
The conclusion of the speech greets Darwin as
the Newton of the organic world, a phrase that
has often been repeated since.
Let us turn over a few pages more in the faded
record of the sitting. Fourteen years later he
would speak again at a scientific congress, and
speak on Darwinism. He would then put it
forward no longer as a hope but a fulfilment, of
which he showed one glittering facet. And no
other than Eudolf Virchow, his former teacher,
would oppose him and deliver his famous speech
on the freedom of science in the modern State
and its abuse by Darwin's followers. This was
at Munich in 1877. The least of his hearers
would remember that Virchow had spoken, like
Haeckel, at Stettin fourteen years previously.
154 HAECKEL
But we must understand the thirty-sixth speech
if we are to understand the thirty-seventh.
It was the second sitting, on September 22nd.
Virchow spoke on "the alleged materialism of
modern science." The subject was not provoked
by Haeckel, but by Schleiden, the botanist, the
parent of the cell-theory. The controversy over
materialism had raged furiously for many years.
We need only mention Biichner (whose Force and
Matter appeared in 1855) and Carl Vogt. There
was an element of necessity, but a good deal of
superficiality in the controversy, as it was then
conducted. Friedrich Albert Lange has given us
a masterly history of it. At this moment it was
particularly instructive to point out the difference
between general philosophical skirmishing with
words and a really able piece of work that, though
it had a technical look, suddenly added a new
province to philosophy on which every doubting
Thomas could lay his hands. However, Schleiden
had not advanced. Curiously enough, he, the
first discoverer of the cell, attacked Virchow's
theory of man as a cell-state as a typical materialist
extravagance.
He had published a heated essay, and Virchow
defended himself. He gave such a remarkable
and characteristic expression of his inmost feelings
that it is worth while disinterring it. It is a very
rare thing for a thoughtful man to give a natural
philosophical speech that begins with crystalline
clearness of logic and then makes a most curious
salto mortale at the critical point.
ERNST HAECKEL, 1880.
Reproduced from the Natiirliche Schopfungsgeschichte.
To face p. 154.
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 155
He opens with a vigorous protest that there
can be no quarrel about the materialism of science
with the " spiritual " and the " privately-orthodox. "
Such people must regard all investigation of "this
world" as aimless. The only thing of value for
them is " the next world 7 '; the best attitude
towards this life is as crass an ignorance as
possible, and so all science is worthless. The
words are so sharp that he was interrupted and
had to explain that he was not attacking anybody
personally. He was only speaking "with the
candour of a scientific worker, who is in the habit
of calling things by their proper names." (At this
point there was some applause.) Hence he is not
speaking of materialism, he says, on that account,
but because of certain objections from men of
science, who said that philosophic speculation led
us out of our way. Schleiden had branded the
theory of man as a cell-state, the conception of
man as, not an absolute, but a federal unity, as
materialism. But this conception is not a philo-
sophical theory at all; it is a fact. It is a piece
of scientific truth, like the law of gravitation. He
recurred to the old and often-quoted definition :
the kind of research that brings such facts to light
has nothing whatever to do with philosophy. On
the other hand, "materialism," in so far as it
expresses a general theory of the world, is a
philosophy. Hence the simple investigation of
facts as such can neither be dubbed materialistic
nor said to have a philosophic tinge.
There are many objections to this strict
156 HAECKEL
delimitation of the provinces of the human mind,
as Virchow lays it down in the old style. It is
true that materialism is a real philosophy, especially
in the form current at the time and given to it by
Vogt and Biichner. But it is a question whether
we see, observe, or investigate at all, if we com-
pletely exclude philosophy; whether the philosophic
thought can be really pumped out of even the most
rigorous and exact " observation of facts," like air
in the air-pump ; whether there are any such
things as purely objective "facts" in this sense
in any human brain. And it is also a question
whether the facts, however objectively we regard
them, do not arrange themselves, when they are
numerous, in logical series, which force us to draw
conclusions as to the unknown by the very laws of
probability; in other words, whether they do not
always produce a " philosophy " in the long run.
However, these questions are all well within the
pure atmosphere of science. It is Virchow's
practical conclusions that are interesting ; and he
goes on to draw them freely.
The man of science gives us no dogmatic
philosophy of any kind, but facts. But for these
facts and for the research that leads to them he
must have an absolutely free path. No power can
legitimately stand in his way that does not offer
him more of what he regards as his palladium
facts. And, curiously enough, when we think of
later events, the illustration that Virchow takes
in 1863 to enforce this is the Darwinism that
Haeckel had just put before them.
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 157
Haeckel and Virchow were friendly colleagues
at the time. We have already said that Haeckel
was Virchow's assistant at Wiirtzburg. Not only
as a man, but especially as a scientist, Virchow
was then (and long afterwards) greatly admired by
him. The idea of the cell-state got into his
blood; it was one of the bases on which he built
up the Darwinian theory. Though he had never
recognised this distinction between the mere
investigation of facts and philosophic reflection
on them, he respected Virchow as a master of
methodological education. What was " method "
at the bottom but philosophy! Was not the
method that expressly excluded " miracles," that
sought always the natural law and the causal
connection and the continuous series, a
" philosophy "? This was the only method
taught under Virchow as long as Haeckel worked
with him. At the time the divergence of their
ideas was not shown more openly. The one
called " philosophy " what the other said was
"the purely objective method of investigating
the truth." The figure of Pilate rises up behind
the dilemma with his question : "What is truth?"
However, Virchow takes Darwinism by way of
an example of which he approves, a point that
seems to be established in the province of pure
facts. In the Munich speech of 1877 there are
polite references to "Herr Haeckel." "As Herr
Haeckel says." "As Herr Haeckel supposes."
At Stettin we find Herr Haeckel described as
"my friend Haeckel," with whom "I quite agree,"
158 HAECKEL
&c. Haeckel himself, by the way, was still
convinced in his essay On the Generation of
Waves in Living Particles two years before the
schismatic Council of 1877 that "Virchow had had
a decisive influence on his own Darwinian career.
"If I have contributed anything myself in an
elementary way to the building-up of the idea of
evolution, I owe it for the most part to the cellular-
biological views with which Virchow's teaching
penetrated me twenty years ago." " As Herr
Haeckel supposes," was the cool repayment of
this sincere expression of gratitude. However,
that is another matter. Let us return to Stettin.
We read, where "my friend Haeckel" comes in,
that he has shown how scientific research (the
pure investigation of facts without the least
tincture of philosophy) has gone on to deal with
" the great question of the creation of man." It
is merely conceded that there are still certain
small outstanding difficulties, as, for instance, at
the root of the genealogical tree. According to
Darwin it is conceivable that there were four or
five primitive forms of life. Haeckel is inclined
to restrict them to a single stem-cell. It seems
to him (Virchow) that there may have been a
number of different beginnings of life. We have
here the opening of the controversy as to the
monophyletic (from one root only) or polyphyletic
(from several roots) development of life, which is
still unsettled as far as the commencement of life
is concerned, but a very secondary question. It
would be well if there had never been any more
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 159
serious difference between Haeckel and Virchow.
The speaker himself thinks it an unimportant
matter beside the great question of freedom for
scientific inquiry. One thing is as clear to him
as it is to Haeckel. The biblical dogma of creation
has broken down. It is impossible to take seriously
any longer the breathing of the breath of life into
a lump of clay, if these Darwinian ideas are sound.
Once it is fully proved that man descends from
the ape, " no tradition in the world will ever
suppress the fact." Scientific inquiry alone can
correct itself. And what it holds to be established
must be respected beyond its frontiers as well.
What does he mean by " beyond its frontiers " ?
He means, as he makes it clear here, the same as
Haeckel himself. " Church and State," he says,
must " reconcile themselves to the fact that with
the advance of science certain changes are bound
to take place in the general ideas and beliefs from
which we build up our highest conceptions, and
that no impediment must be put in the way of
these changes ; in fact, the far-seeing Government
and the open-minded Church will always assimilate
these advancing and developing ideas and make
them fruitful." What more do we want ?
If this were the conclusion of Virchow's speech,
it would be merely a confirmation of Haeckel's
the kind of support that the older worker can give
to ardent youth, though on different grounds. But
the cloven foot has still to peep out. I believe
that, in the pure struggle of ideas, we can determine
here, in 1863, precisely the point where Virchow
160 HAECKEL
falls falls into a line that has nothing in common
with the ideal struggle of the really free and
liberating thought of humanity. We come to the
great salto mortale, which one must see from 1863
onward in order to understand the Virchow of 1877.
The passage is the more interesting as it refers
to one of the chief stages in the development of
Haeckel's mind. The conception of man as a cell-
state, established by Virchow in so masterly a
fashion, involved a very curious conclusion. This
conclusion, however we take it, came so close to
the roots of every philosophy that it justified
Schleiden to some extent when he protested that
the whole cell-state theory was a philosophical
element.
If the human body is composed of millions
of cells ; if all the processes and functions, the
whole life of the body in Virchow's sense, are
merely the sum of the vital processes and functions
of these millions of individual cells; is not what
we call "the soul" really the product of the
millions upon millions of separate souls of these
cells ? Is not man's soul merely the state-soul,
the general spirit of this gigantic complex of
tiny cell-souls ? The lowest living things we
spoke of, which consist of a single cell, showed
unmistakable signs of having a psychic life.
There was nothing to prevent us from thinking
that in the combination of these various cells
into communities each of them brought with
it its little psychic individuality. And just as
the individual bodies of the cells combined ex-
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 161
ternally to form the new individual of the human
body, so the cell-souls would enter into a spiritual
combination to form the new psychic individuality
of the human mind. I say there was nothing
to prevent us from thinking this, in the line of
deductions from the plain principles of the cell-
state theory which Virchow claimed to be a naked
"fact." Philosophically, however, an immense
number of questions, problems, doubts, and hopes
lurked behind it. The whole conception of indi-
viduality took on a new aspect. First, in the
material sense ; the individual human being
seemed to be, bodily, only the connecting bracket,
as it were, of countless deeper individuals, the
cells. But it was more significant on the spiritual
side. The individual human soul could be ana-
lysed into millions of smaller psychic individu-
alities, the cell-souls, of which it was the sum.
The unified ego, the consciousness of self and
unity of the psychic clamp, " man," remained
as the connection of all the cell-souls. A ray
of light was thrown on the deep mystery of the
origin of individualities, material and spiritual.
Haeckel devoted himself afterwards to the question
with all his energy. But at the time it was
Virchow who, unconsciously enough, started the
great wave that welled up from the depths of
his theory.
He had marked out his path very clearly in
the first part of his speech. Scientific research
collects facts. It puts them before us without
any reference to philosophy. The less philosophy
11
162 HAECKEL
there is in the investigation of facts the better.
But the other side of the matter is that no power
in heaven or on earth has anything to say as
regards its work on things that it holds to be facts.
The only possible logical conclusion from this,
with reference to the question of the cell-soul,
was for the investigator of facts to say : Even in
respect of the psychic life we go our way and
look neither to right nor left, whatever conclusions
and assumptions the philosopher makes. Virchow
acted very differently.
He first grants that this dissolution of man
into a federal unity of countless cells must some-
how affect the " unified soul." We are compelled
" to set up a plurality even in the psychic life."
He has reached the limit of his radicalism. We
expect him to continue : Hence, as in the case
of the Mosaic story of creation, of Darwinism, of
the cell-theory as a whole, so here we men of
science go our way unmoved ; even if the whole
of the teaching that has hitherto prevailed in
philosophy and theology in regard to the soul
breaks down, we simply go our way, and do
not ask anybody's permission. This he does
not do. Take one step further, he says, and
we "can easily believe that it is necessary to
split up our whole psychic life in this way and
ascribe a soul to each individual cell." Haeckel
believed a little later that this was necessary;
that the most rigorous logic compelled us to
do it. But, says Virchow suddenly, we must
protest most vigorously against this. This de-
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 163
duction from the cell-state theory reaches a point
where " science is incompetent/' namely, "the
facts of consciousness." Taboo ! The path of
the scientific inquirer is barricaded. What follows
rests on no scientific grounds, but is a sort of
confession. Up to the present natural science
has not been able to say anything as to the real
nature, the locality, and the ground of conscious-
ness. " Hence I have always said that it is
wrong to refuse to recognise the peculiar character
of these facts of consciousness that dominate
our whole higher life, and to yield to the personal
craving to bring these facts of consciousness into
accord with an independent soul, a spiritual force,
and let the individual formulate his religious feeling
according to his conscience and disposition. That
is, I think, the point where science makes its com-
promise with the Churches, recognising that this is
a province that each can survey as he will, either
putting his own interpretation on it or accepting the
traditional ideas ; and it must be sacred to others."
The direction of the logic is clear enough. The
application of the cell-state theory to psychic life
must lead to the problem of consciousness. But
we must not follow it, because science has never
yet penetrated into this province. It is the pro-
vince of peaceful compromise with " the Church,"
and we must respect it.
It seems to me that the explanation is clear.
The whole field of conflict that Haeckel found
within the science of his time is opened out, though
Virchow was by no means disposed at that time to
164 HAECKEL
take Darwinism as an example of the thing to be
avoided, as he did at Munich fourteen years after-
wards. The kind of scientific inquiry that Vir-
chow advocated is what was called " exact'' at a
later period. It kept clear of all philosophical
speculation, and repeated over and over again that
it was only concerned with facts. It had, however,
another card to play peace with " the Churches."
Philosophy was shunned in order to leave a free
field for the Churches to build in. Then the exact
scientist took his hat and said, I am afraid I am
incompetent, and the philosopher is incompetent,
to do anything here; let the Church take the
vacant chair, with my compliments. No philo-
sophy : on this we will make war to the knife. This
is " a point where science makes its compromise
with the Churches." No one can understand
Haeckel's career who does not grasp this anti-
thesis. The contrast between Haeckel and Vir-
chow, known to all the world since 1877, is clearly
indicated. Virchow's speech in 1877 is obscure.
We must go back to 1863 to get behind the
veil the veil that hides Virchow, that is to say,
the most prominent representative of the hostility
to Haeckel. We cannot understand otherwise
how this yawning gulf came about between
Haeckel's ideas and a school that professed to
follow " exact" research. Haeckel was building
up a natural philosophy which, starting from the
solid foundation of scientific research and its
results, went on to further, and greater, and more
far-reaching issues, that could not be seen, but
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 165
could be reached philosophically by more or less
happy deductions from the scientific data. It
might or might not have lasting value in points of
detail. He was subject to the law of evolution.
He worked with analogy, and the things he com-
pared thereto were ever changing. It was all the
same to him. In any case the dawning glimmer
of the perfect light broadened out and lit up
vague outlines even in the cloud-wreathed un-
known. The others worked in such a way as to
leave beside them provinces of a virgin white-
ness, untouched by thought or logic. At times
they slipped into these provinces, and celebrated
their reconciliation-festival with "the Churches."
The layman continued to think that the Churches
wielded an absolute authority ; that the scientist,
abandoning his natural philosophy, came to pay
them tribute. This situation has done infinite
mischief, more than the wildest and even obviously
perverse philosophy ever did. It put the scientist
in the position of a tolerated vassal in the world of
thought the world that the Churches had held in
chains for ages. Woe to the man who ventured
to discuss " consciousness " ! Not because science
had but the slender proportions of a pioneer in that
field, and because there was a danger of it making
great mistakes with its natural philosophy. No,
but because the white neutral field began here that
we had agreed to respect we " exact " scientists
and " the Churches. " This was the real reason
why Virchow and so many others who advocated
the strict investigation of facts had forfeited the
166 HAECKEL
right to oppose Haeckel's bolder natural philosophy
and its conclusion will have forfeited the right, at
least, in the judgment of a future and more im-
partial generation. They did not oppose him on
the lines of an equal zeal for the truth, but on much
lower and reactionary lines. Their concern was not
for the absolute triumph of truth, but for a com-
promise with certain forces in public life whose
supremacy was not grounded on logic but on
inherited external power. It required a certain
amount of diplomatic shrewdness to enter into this
compromise, in view of the practical power of those
forces. Haeckel never had this " shrewdness."
We grant that. But it is certainly a confusion of
all standards when the shrewdness of the individual
tries to entrench itself behind ostensible claims of
scientific method ; when research abandons all
advance on certain sides on the plea of "exact-
ness " instead of philosophising and then itself
makes use of this exactness for compromising with
an ecclesiastical tradition that only differs from
real philosophy in its antiquity and rigidity, its dis-
dain of rational argument, and its employment of
secular weapons that certain historical events
have put in its hand without any merit on its
own part.
The darkest cloud that hung menacingly on the
horizon of Darwinism came from this quarter. At
the moment we are dealing with it did not cause
much concern. This early Darwinism thrilled
with optimism as with the magic of spring.
Haeckel had to speak once more in the course of
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 167
the Congress. The geologist, Otto Volger, made a
polite but energetic protest against the new theory
in the final sitting. It was a curious connection of
things that brought Volger into such a position.
Volger is the man who saved for Germany the
venerable Goethe-house at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
The Free German Chapter received it from him
as a gift. The action has nothing to do with
geology, but it stands in the annals of culture.
Thus the shadow of Goethe came to Stettin, to be
present at the open birth of German Darwinism-
Goethe, who had once stood on the very brink of
the evolutionary ideas. And the man who brought
him was a geologist who felt moved to attack the
ideas of Darwin and Haeckel !
No part of science became in the succeeding
decades so fruitful for Darwinistic purposes as
geology. It might very well be called a continuous
argument for Darwin ; from the little slab of
Solenhofen Jurassic schist that yielded, in 1861,
the first impression of the archeopteryx, the
real connecting link between the lizard and the
bird, to the incomparable discoveries of Othniel
Marsh, Cope, and Ameghino in America, which
put whole sections of the genealogical tree of the
mammals before us, on to the skull and thigh-
bone of the ape-man (pithecanthropus) of Java,
found by Eugen Dubois, which brings so vividly
home to us the transition from the gibbon to man.
But, as if it had been scared away by the new idea
of evolution and its demand for proof, the most
and the best of this material was not forthcoming
168 HAECKEL
until after Darwin was pretty firmly established
everywhere. At the earlier date we are dealing
with it was quite possible for a geologist to play
the sceptic with a shadow of justification. We
need not go into the point to-day. It is ancient
history. But there is an incidental point in
Volger's criticism and the reply it provoked from
Haeckel that calls for notice.
Volger declared that Darwinism in general was
an unsupported hypothesis, but he made a con-
cession. The species of animals and plants need
not be absolutely unchangeable. The only thing
that is impossible is a continuous upward direction
in evolution. All the groups of living things, even
the highest, may have been present together from
the earliest days. Local changes in the distribu-
tion of land and water, &c., must have brought
about a certain amount of variation in life-forms.
But after brief divergences all would return to the
original type. The proper symbol of the story of
life is the wave that rises out of the sea and sinks
back into it. There was no such thing as a
steady advance, a wave that never sank back
into the water. The real image of human life
is the analogy of its obvious development : youth,
maturity, then old age and back once more. The
speaker urged in plausible terms that this concep-
tion retained the idea of an " eternal becoming,"
which is better than a rigid fulfilment. As if an
eternally advancing evolution did not include this
" eternal becoming." Haeckel spoke immediately
after Volger. He not only attacked the weak
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 169
points of the geologist, but went on to the deeper
philosophic question. The notion of a " perennial
circular movement " is " inconsistent with all
the facts of human history." "If we appeal to
sentiment, I must say that this circular theory
has no attraction for me, whereas the Darwinian
idea of a progressive evolution seems the only one
consistent with the nature of man." The story
of the animals and plants is subject to "the law
of progress" just as much as human history.
In these words of Haeckel's we have a clear
indication of the optimistic temper of Darwinism
at the time. They touch a question of funda-
mental importance for the value of the new theory:
the question whether, in spite of all it destroyed,
in spite of its disseverance from the idea of God,
it brought with it a new ground of conciliation,
a conviction of the ever- advancing growth of the
world and ever greater achievements ? God was
replaced by natural law. There was no longer
any " design " beyond the simple and unchang-
ing course of natural laws. Well, what were
these natural laws going to do for us ? Were
they giving us a world that would become more
and more harmonious, that was on the whole an
advancing organism, that would be an increasing
embodiment of God the God within nature, not
without, God at the end of things, after seons of
worlds that seemed to break up like the indivi-
dual in the struggle for existence, yet were eternal
in the mighty essence that was tossed on from
world to world like a grain of dust and was
170 HAECKEL
made the starting-point of infinitely new and
more complex movements? Or was the work
of these natural laws but a ceaseless poking and
thrusting and bubble-blowing without any inner
meaning? Was it the play of waves that rise
and fall, and rise and fall again, in the ocean,
an eternal melting into smoke and nothingness ?
Was the whole of " evolution" an absolutely
meaningless play of innumerable tendencies, not
one of which would ever come to anything?
This note also was found in the first melody.
Something would have been lacking if it had
not been struck. Here again there could be a
parting of ways, not only in the crowd, but
amongst the thoughtful. The whole struggle of
optimism and pessimism might be dragged in.
At all events, the problem was bound to be
pointed out from the start.
When Volger, not a bad opponent at the bottom,
and Haeckel had made their speeches, indicating
at once certain lasting antitheses within the
subtle philosophy of Darwinism, Virchow closes
the debates and the Congress with a most
dangerous blessing. In essentials he is once more
on the side of Haeckel. He suggests that geology
should be allowed to mature a little before final
judgment is passed. The strongest evidence for
evolution is found in embryology (the science of
the embryonic forms and uterine development of
living species of animals). The prophecy was
fulfilled, if ever prophecy was, and in Haeckel' s
own most particular field of work. But, in fine
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863 171
he returns to his point the main thing is the
" pursuit of truth." And since " the most earnest
ecclesiastical teachers " declared that " God is
truth," he could not do better than close with a
reminder (I quote him verbatim) of "the com-
promise that may be effected between science and
the Church." Translated into plain language, *V t a-
that means : My dear children, fight it out as you
will, but respect the Church always as the main
thing, and you will do well, however much you
differ. Thus closed this remarkable Scientific
Congress as quietly as a bomb that smokes noise-
lessly, like a whiff from a tobacco pipe. But one
day it will burst.
CHAPTEE VI
THE " GENEKAL MOBPHOLOGY "
speech at the Scientific Congress in 1863
JL was the first open confession that Haeckel
felt bound to make. But the real work for the
new ideas began on his return to Jena. Nothing
was further from Haeckel's thoughts at that time
than the idea of becoming merely the populariser
of Darwinism in Germany. He has often been
spoken of since in lay circles as such. It is en-
tirely wrong. He had the courage to recognise
his debt whenever he contracted one ; and cer-
tainly Darwin supplied the groundwork of his
colour-scheme. But he was much too independent
and individual in his nature not to take the axe
in his own hand at once and begin to hew away
himself.
Darwin had strengthened his book with a large
amount of the best material that zoology and
botany could supply. But there was something
else to be done : a theoretical treatment of a
general character with cleverly grouped illustra-
172
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 173
tions from the facts already provided by two
sciences, and to reconstruct these sciences from
their foundations on the basis of the new theory.
At that time Haeckel was doing an incredible
amount of work, with body and mind. He had
an iron constitution. In the year of the Stettin
speech he won a laurel crown at the Leipsic
athletic festival for the long jump, with a leap of
twenty feet. His physical strength seemed so
inexhaustible that his host, Engelmann, put a
pair of heavy iron dumb-bells in his bed, in case
he should want to take exercise during the night.
He had a proportionate strength of mind. Every-
thing seemed to promise very well for the next
few years, so that he could devote his whole health
and strength to the great task of his life. His
teaching did not give him very much trouble in
a small university like Jena, that was only just
beginning to have a scientific name. The happi-
ness of his home life, with a highly gifted woman
who shared all his ideas with the freshness of
youth, began to chain the restless wanderer with
pleasant bonds to his place. He, of course, ex-
pected to have his sea-holiday in the old way for
the study of his little marine treasures, but other-
wise he remained quietly in the valley of the Saale.
The warmth of genial and most stimulating
friendships gathered about his life. With his
comfortable material position he set to work
on his great task under the best auspices.
He would have had at the start material enough
to work upon without Darwin. From Miiller's
174: HAECKEL
time he still had another special class of material,
similar to the radiolaria, the medusae.
The ship cuts through the ocean. It rises like
a lofty fortress from the illimitable blue plain,
with the white clouds on the far horizon. No
land has been in sight for days. Yesterday a poor
wind-borne butterfly rested on the deck. To-day
it is gone, and all is sea. Then they suddenly
appear silently in the blue mirror : mysterious
discs, red as the anemones on a Roman meadow
in spring, golden as the autumn leaves on a dark
pond in the park, then blue, like a lighter blue
floating on the general azure. They are the me-
dusae. At one time the ship sails through a whole
swarm of them thousands, hundreds of thousands,
millions, a veritable milky way of coloured stars.
On the next day they have all gone. No inhabi-
tant of the ocean seems to be so close to it as
this creature. The whole animal is only a shade
more substantial than the water. You take it out,
and try to catch hold of it. It stings your hand
like a nettle : that is its one weapon. But it is
already destroyed, melted away, a formless nothing.
You put it on a piece of blotting-paper, and it
dries up into the spectral outline of a shadow, a
tiny " fat-spot," summary of its whole existence.
Yet this soap-bubble of the water is a real
animal. Its transparent body is shaped like a bell,
and moves through the water by regular contrac-
tion and expansion, like the lung in breathing.
Where the clapper of the bell should be, we find
a stomach, with a mouth for eating, hanging down
THE -GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 175
from the curved upper part. At the edge of the
curved surface are many long fibrils that close on
the approaching prey and paralyse it by their
sting. Then it thrusts it into its mouth and
swallows the object into the stomach. The
medusa is, of course, a very lowly creature, but
it is much more advanced in organisation than
the tiny radiolarian. The radiolarian consists of a
single cell. The medusa is a cell-state, a commu-
nity of countless cells with a division of labour
amongst them. Some of the cells form the wall
of the bell, some the stinging threads, some the
devouring and digesting stomach. In this the
medusa comes nearer to man than the radiolarian.
Some of the cells see to the reproduction of the
medusa. Ova and spermatozoa are detached from
the cell-community of the medusa's body, blend
together, and thus form the germ of a new
medusa. In most cases the process is curious
enough. From the germ-cell we get at first, not
a real medusa, but a polyp that attaches itself to
the ground, a little creature that may be remotely
compared to the pretty water-lilies that meet the
eye in an aquarium. Then the polyp produces
something like a plant that grows buds, the real
medusae ; it may produce these out of its sub-
stance as buds, and they then float away like
detached flowers, or (in other species) it may
gradually change itself into a chain of medusae,
of which the uppermost is detached first, then the
next, and so on.
Since this peculiar method of reproduction
176 HAECKEL
became known, in the thirties or forties, the
medusaB were regarded as amongst the most
interesting objects in the whole of zoology. They
offered an extremely difficult task to the investi-
gator who would care to take up the study of
them.
When Haeckel was with Johannes Miiller in
Heligoland in 1854 he made acquaintance with
them for the first time. His artistic eye was
caught with their beauty, as it was afterwards
with the radiolaria. " Never shall I forget, " he
says, " the delight with which, as a student of
twenty years I gazed on the first Tiara and Irene
[species of medusae] , and the first Ghrysaora and
Cyanea, and endeavoured to reproduce their
beautiful forms and colours." His predilection
for the medusae never disappeared. At Nice
in 1856 he met them again in the Mediterranean.
Gegenbaur's Sketch of a Classification of the Me-
dusa provided his studies with a starting-point,
just as Miiller's writings did afterwards for the
radiolaria. At Naples and Messina he completed
his mastery of them. When he had done with
the radiolaria for the time after publishing the great
monograph of 1862, the next task that loomed up
on his horizon was the need for a " monograph on
the medusae." It would be a long time, however,
before he could complete the work in any fulness.
A work of Agassiz that purported to do it, but, in
his opinion, only confused the subject he disliked
both the Agassizs, father and son, and the father
became one of his bitterest opponents on the
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 177
Darwinian question gave him a negative impulse
to the study. He thought it would be best to
deal with one family of the medusae after another
in separate monographs, as time permitted. The
first of these essays appeared in 1864 and 1865,
and dealt with what are known as the " snouted-
medusae " (geryonidce). The first volume of the
complete work was not published until fourteen
years afterwards. If Haeckel had decided to work
as a specialist he would have had material enough
here to occupy him fully throughout the whole
of the sixties, and even longer. The keen student
of the radiolaria would be succeeded by the equally
keen student of the medusae. More folio volumes
would have accumulated, with beautiful plates,
such as only the technical student of zoology ever
takes out of the library. His name, like that of
his friend Gegenbaur almost, would never have
reached the crowd.
It was the influence of Darwin that prevented
this. His attention was turned in another direction,
and we begin to realise the full greatness of his
power when we remember that he nevertheless
continued with unfailing quality to publish such
detailed studies as those on the medusae.
Darwinian ideas were fermenting intensely in
his mind at that time. The most audacious prac-
tical and theoretical problems arose from the
fundamental theory, and forced themselves on him
at every moment. A great deal was sketched in
outline in the Stettin speech, but the serious
scientific work would have to be begun on his
12
178 HAECKEL
return to Jena, in his view. First, he thought,
two features of Darwin's system must be given a
completely new and original complexion. Firstly,
the bottom of the tree, where life begins. Secondly,
the crown of all terrestrial evolution : the manner
in which man is connected with the tree. It was
his philosophic vein that settled both points, the
philosophy of unity that sought to replace God by
natural development, both below and above, in
regard to the primitive cell and in regard to man.
But the way in which he set about it was very far
removed from all conventional philosophy. The
whole rigour of his professional zoology found
expression in it. And that was really the novelty
of it. The same conclusions might have been
drawn by any dozen ordinary philosophers, once
they got on the right track. Even they could see
that, if two and two are four, one and one are two,
and three times three nine. Haeckel went very
differently, and much more profoundly, to work.
As an old pupil of Virchow's he applies the cell-
theory to Darwinism in the lower stage. The
first living things, the roots of the great tree of
life, consisted of a single cell. The logic of the
cell-theory itself went as far as this. But is the
individual cell the simplest of all living forms ?
Here there was a long-standing controversy as to
definitions. At first the cell was regarded literally
as a kind of chamber, like the cell in the honey-
comb. Then it was found that the jelly-like,
mobile matter within the cell-chamber was the
essential element, the vehicle of life. Finally, it
ERNST HAECKKI., 1890.
From a relief-portrait modelled by Kopf, of Rome.
To face p. 178.
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 179
was possible to conceive this slimy substance with-
out any firm membrane, without a chamber. In-
side it, however, there was always (it was then
thought) a thick and hard substance, the nucleus.
If that was the fundamental and only really essen-
tial form, the Darwinian primitive and initial type
of all terrestrial life must have been a similar
drop of living matter with a solid central nucleus,
a nucleated individual cell.
How could we pass from this primitive cell to
the " inorganic," the "lifeless," the " dead," the
ordinary matter of stone, metal, and crystal?
Haeckel believed that it was possible to make a
step in that direction not theoretically and philo-
sophically, but practically by showing that there
were still living things on the earth that did not
come up to the definition of a true cell, things that
had not yet a nucleus in their soft gelatinous body.
He discovered a number of tiny creatures that had
a homogeneous particle of living matter for body,
and showed no trace of a nucleus. The nucleus
seemed to be the first beginning of an organ. It
was altogether wanting in them.
To these most primitive of all living things he
gave the name of monera, or the absolutely
" simple."
In these investigations it is very difficult to
determine whether one of these tiny drops of plasm
has a more or less transparent nucleus or not. It
has often been affirmed in later years that these
monera of Haeckel's did not correspond to their
description as living things without a nucleus, or
180 HAECKEL
creatures that were below the level of the true cell.
It is, at all events, certain that there are to-day
large numbers of the unicellular beings known as
the bacteria in which no nucleus has yet been dis-
covered by the most sceptical Thomas with the
most powerful microscopes and best technical
appliances of our time. It is the same with the
chromacea (chroococci, oscillaria, nostoc- algae),
very lowly primitive plants whose whole body con-
sists of a globule or granule of living plasm. How-
ever, here again the question is no longer of the
first importance, now that evolution is entirely
and generally accepted. At the time we are dis-
cussing the method chosen was all-important.
Haeckel drew no conclusions without a solid basis.
He believed he could give ocular proof of the
existence of beings that were below the level of the
cell. It was clear, at all events, that research in
this department was only in its beginning, and
could pour out wonder after wonder before the
world recovered from its first fright over Dar-
winism.
Then there was the other end of the system
man. Here again it was not merely a question of
concluding on philosophic grounds that man must
have descended from the lower animals. Huxley
had dealt in England with the question of man
and the ape on the strict lines of zoology. He
came to the important conclusion that man differs
less zoologically from the highest apes, the gorilla
and chimpanzee, than they do from the lowest apes.
He proved his point by a technical study of skulls
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 181
and brains, not from abstract philosophical prin-
ciples. It could be demonstrated in the museum
or zoological institute to any student with some
knowledge of anatomy as easily as the existence
and position of any particular bone in the skeleton.
Haeckel went even further.
He constructed a genealogical tree stretching far
below the apes. Next to them came the lemurs.
The lemur, the ghostly nocturnal inhabitant of
Madagascar, came from the Australian marsupial
(kangaroo, &c.). The marsupial came from the
duck-bill ; the duck-bill from the lizard ; the lizard
from the salamander ; the salamander from the
dipneust or mud-fish ; this from the sturgeon or the
shark, and the shark from the lamprey. Below
the lamprey, at the lowest limit of the vertebrate
kingdom, was the amphioxus (or lancelet). This
must have come from the worm it was not at all
clear how, at that time. And so the series ran on
down to the unicellular protozoa, the amoebae and
the monera.
The construction of this tree would have been
impossible for one who had not already done
gigantic work. The whole of the new system of
animals and plants, conceived in the form of a
genealogical tree, had first to be sketched in outline.
Then the narrower thread that led up to man, the
Ariadne-thread of God-Nature, v/ould gradually
come to light.
Both ends of the system, the lower one in the
monera, the upper one in man, were first
thoroughly treated by him in 1865, and in part
182 HAECKEL
somewhat later. His exhaustive Monograph on
the Monera was not published until 1868. Man's
genealogical tree was privately circulated at Jena
in two essays in October and November 1865.
They were published in the Virchow-Holtzendorff:
collection in 1868 (" The Origin and Genealogical
Tree of the Human Eace "). But in both cases
the substance of the work, as an accumulation
of facts, is much older. And this work was, of
course, only possible in connection with a number
of further conclusions : in regard to spontaneous
generation, life and death, the crystal and the
cell, the mathematical form of organisms, the
nature and limits of individuality, the method of
research, the new natural philosophy, God, and
so on.
It was an enormous programme, with a Para-
disaic freshness. Everything was new and great ;
and all came from one brain. There was only
one man with whom he discussed his ideas as
they formed, Carl Gegenbaur, who has undoubtedly
had a great, if unconscious, influence on them.
HaeckeFs grateful recognition of Gegenbaur's help
in later years was endless and touching. " Thou
it was," he writes to him a little later, " that led
me to begin my academic teaching at our beloved
Jena six years ago, at the Thuringian university
in the heart of Germany, that has, like a beating
heart, sent out its living waves of freedom and
alertness of mind over Germany for three hundred
years. At this nursery of German philosophy and
science, under the protection of a free State whose
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 183
princely rulers ever gave a refuge to free speech
and have linked their names for ever with the
reform movement, the golden age of German
poetry, I was able to work in association with thee.
Here we built up our common structure of science
in the happiest division of labour, teaching and
learning cordially from each other, in the very
rooms in which Goethe began his studies of ' the
morphology of organisms ' a half-century before,
and partly with the same scientific means, the germs
of comparative and philosophic science that he
had scattered. We have shared with each other as
brothers the happiness and the sorrow that came
in the hard struggle for life, and our scientific
efforts have been so intimately blended and so
mutually helpful, through our daily working and
talking together, that it would have been impossible
for either of us to determine the particular share
of each in our spiritual communism. I can only
say in a general way that the little my restless and
impulsive youth could offer thee here and there
is out of all proportion to the enormous amount I
have received from thee, eight years my senior, a
more experienced and mature man."
Goethe stood behind the friends as the quiet
genius loci, giving his blessing to all who worked
in his spirit on the old spot. Nor was the place
itself without influence. " Much," Haeckel writes,
" may have been even the outcome of the common
uplifting enjoyment of nature that was afforded us
by the artistic lines of the Jena hills, as they
brought before us once more at sunset the magic
184 HAECKEL
of the Calabrian mountains by the colour-harmony
of their purple and gold banks of cloud and their
violet shadows."
" What are the hopes, what are the plans, that
man, the creature of a day, builds up ? "
The words were written by a poet, in his fatal
illness, at the spot where the two strong spirits
now worked. In the midst of all his hopes and
plans Haeckel was struck by a Niobe-shaft. On
February 16th, 1864, just on his thirtieth birth-
day, his wife, only in her twenty-ninth year, in the
full force of mind and of love, succumbed to blood-
poisoning.
I turn to the thick volume of Haeckel's Mono-
graph on the Medusce. Part I. : " System of the
Medusae : " with an atlas of forty beautiful plates :
published by Gustav Fischer, of Jena, in 1879.
Few people except zoologists with a technical
interest in it have ever opened this voluminous
work why should they ? It is a heavy work, with
dry diagnoses. The author seems to be far away
from all general questions, if ever he was, in the
utter stillness of his study. This pure accumula-
tion of matter for truth's sake does not reach the
ear of the world. It lays up material for remote
days, before which the individual fades away ; it is
merely catalogued material of the most technical
character. Yet, as I turn over the pages, I
seem to see a little image from time to time
that is almost like the rose-red or golden-brown
medusae in the sterile, illimitable ocean. In truth
neither ocean nor book is sterile ; but they are grey
THE -GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 185
and broad. And just as the swimming medusa
gladdens me in the one, so a little personal trait
of the author does in the other. It is in the choice
of the Latin names. A little crown is woven
that unites aesthetics and science. I find splendid
names, invented by the Professor, on all sides.
But I notice that his heart was in these things.
He has discovered new species of medusas, and
must christen them. As he turns over his Latin
or Greek lexicon a ray of humanity steals into the
most severe scientific soul at such moments. I
read that a disco-medusa is called the Nausicaa
pliceacum : "I observed the Nausicaa ph&acum
in April, 1877, at Corfu, on the shore of Phaeaca,
in the heart of the Nausicaa. " A cyaneid is given
the fine name of the Melusina formosa. It is
noted, with great regret, that " so fine and classic
a name for a medusa " as Oceania must be struck
out on scientific grounds. Amongst descriptions
of species in a severe scientific tongue that
unnerves the timid reader, amongst gonods, styles,
perradial bundles of tentacles, and ocellar bulbs,
we find, apropos of the medusa, Lizzia Elisabethce :
"As Forbes dedicated the pretty genus Lizzia
blondina to a ' blond Elizabeth,' I do the same,
and wish to honour, not only St. Elizabeth of
Thuringia, but also the * blond Elizabeth' of
Immermann and my own dear daughter Eliza-
beth."
Then, in the middle of the large volume, we
find the following passage on page 189. A medusa
is given the name of Mitrocoma Annce. The
186 HAECKEL
name was given at Villefranche, near Nice, in
April, 1864. This medusa had " a fairy-like appear,
ance " to its discoverer ; its tentacles hung down
" like a mass of blond hair ! " A note to the name
tells us that it was given " in memory of my dear,
never-to-be-forgotten wife, Anna Sethe. If it is
given to me to do something during my earthly
pilgrimage for science and humanity, I owe it
for the most part to the blessed influence of my
gifted wife, who was torn from me by a premature
end in 1864. " In the Art-forms in Nature,
Haeckel's work of 1899, we find a medusa Des-
monema Annasethe similarly after thirty-five
years apostrophised: " The specific name of this
pretty disco-medusa, one of the most beautiful and
interesting of all the medusae, immortalises the
memory of Anna Sethe, the gifted and refined wife
(born 1835, died 1864) to whom the author of
this work owes the happiest years of his life."
If one would fathom the depths of human
emotion one must reflect what these words, in
such a context, contain; it is the last gentle
vibration of a most deep inner experience break-
ing out into this prosaic, scientific material. A
medusa is a trivial, possibly a funny thing, to
the layman. The man of science looks deeper
into it, and sees a wonderful revelation of nature ;
the eye of Goethe's God shines on him from it.
But when he has devoted years to the most
careful study of it, it assumes also a naive indi-
vidual interest for him, as the companion of his
solitary hours of observation in the heart of
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 187
nature, far from all the whirl and bustle of the
world. Only the deepest and most intimate feelings
break out in such moments. And here they have
left their monument in a Latin name that science
will go on coldly entering in its catalogues for
ages to come. It seems to me that this simple
fact tells us more of the character of this true-
hearted man, in whom nothing human was lacking,
than long narratives could.
When the aged Sethe saw the break-up in 1806
of the State of Prussia, in the invulnerability of
which he had believed as a gospel, he sought
refuge in the comfort of work. " I succeeded in
benumbing my mind : I experienced in myself
that hard work is a soothing balsam, co-operating
with our tardy healing force." The grandson,
wounded in a more terrible way and cut to the very
heart, tried the same remedy.
Thirty years afterwards, when crowns were^
prepared and speeches delivered in honour of
HaeckeFs sixtieth birthday, when the whole of
Jena feted him as their own, and the veil fell from
his marble bust in the Zoological Institute, to
which seven hundred of the best known names in
German and foreign science had contributed, the
hero of it all went back to that dark hour. " I
thought at the time that I could not survive the
blow, thought my life was closed, and purposed to
bring together all the new ideas that Darwin's
theory of evolution had evoked in me in a last
great work. That was the origin, amid bitter
188 HAECKEL
struggles, of the Generelle Morphologic. It was
written and printed in less than a year. I lived
the life of a hermit, gave myself barely three or
four hours sleep a day, and worked all day and half
the night. My habits were so ascetic that I really
wonder I am alive and well before you to-day."
In his hour of collapse Haeckel sat down and
wrote "the book of his life." There were only two
alternatives for a book written in such circum-
stances. It would be either very bad or very good.
When a young man in his thirties throws himself
into a great effort of this kind and writes a work
that he conceives as a testament a work in which
he will speak for the last time, but will say every-
thing it is a desperate test of all that he has done
in his three decades of life and is about to give to
the world. In this case the test succeeded beyond
all expectation.
The General Morphology of Organisms * was
published in 1866, with the sub-title : " General
elements of the science of organic forms, mechani-
cally grounded on the theory of descent as reformed
by Charles Darwin." It consists of two thick
volumes of small print, containing more than 1,200
pages. The preface is dated September 14, 1866.
It is now one of the most important works in the
whole mental output of the second half of the nine-
teenth century. In respect of method of scientific
research it is a landmark by which we may charac-
terise and appraise the whole half-century. For
* This work of Professor Haeckel's has not been translated
into English. [Trans.]
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 189
general biological classification it inaugurates a
new epoch, as had been done fifty years before by
Cuvier, and again fifty years earlier by Linne.
What it did for zoology in the narrow sense was
thirty years afterwards summed up in one phrase
by a writer of acknowledged competence, Richard
Hertwig : " Few works have done as much towards
raising the intellectual level of zoology." Among
Haeckel's own achievements, great and varied as
they are, this work occupies the highest place.
Setting aside certain special pieces of research,
and regarding him mainly as a man of great ideas,
we find his whole programme in this work. The
History of Creation, that has taken his name far
and wide over the globe beyond the frontiers of
zoology, is only an extract from this work. He
put his heart in it. The others are only the im-
proved blood-vessels of his system of ideas, partly
duplications, partly simplifications. I do not say
this either in blind admiration or in criticism, but
as the expression of a plain fact. Posterity will
turn to this work when, either in hostility or in
sympathy, it wishes to appreciate Haeckel.*
His contemporaries did not accept the work
without difficulty. It came out without noise,
exerted a tremendous influence in a quiet way,
and at last disappeared altogether from the book-
shops. It is still attacked, but has never been
refuted. At libraries one finds, as I know from
experience, that it is always u out," and therefore
* Professor Huxley described the General Morphology as " one
of the greatest scientific works ever published." [Trans.]
190 HAECKEL
must be read continually. It is found occasionally
at second-hand booksellers ; an antiquarian price
running to five pounds and more is put on it,
after forty years' active production on the part of
its author. At present you could count on your
fingers the German works that have this distinc-
tion of being highly priced and out of print. One
such is Vischer's ^Esthetics, and another is the
first edition of Gottfried Keller's Green Henry.
Keller had threatened any one who ever attempted
to republish this first edition (afterwards modified
but not improved by him) that their hand would
not rest quietly in the grave. But the price of
the work went up amongst antiquarians. I feel,
in speaking of Haeckel's General Morphology, that
I am describing a book which has become so rare
that one must treat it as something new, a codex
that is only accessible to a few. It is certainly
not known to the general reader.
Let me endeavour in a few words to give a
general idea of the chief contents of the work.
All the intellectual forces that had had any
influence upon Haeckel now concentrated for a
supreme achievement. First of these was Goethe,
who supplied the title, " Morphology." In its
simplest signification morphology is merely " the
science of forms." If I take houses, furniture,
statues, fishes, flowers, crystals, &c., and only
regard and describe their forms, I am a morpho-
logist in the literal sense of the word. But when
Goethe invented the term he sought to give it
a more restricted application, writing in the style
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 191
of earlier days, but clearly enough, at Jena in 1807.
We have, he says, natural objects before us,
especially living objects. We try to penetrate the
secrets of their nature and their action. We are
not merely observers, but philosophers. It is from
this point of view that we approach the subject.
It appears to us that the best way to proceed is
to separate the various parts. Such a procedure
seems calculated to take us very far. Chemistry
and anatomy are instances of this analytic kind
of research, and both are greatly esteemed and
successful. But this method has its limitations.
"We can easily break up the living thing into
its elements, but we cannot put these together
again and restore them to life. We cannot do
this in the case of many inorganic, to say
nothing of organic, bodies." What are we to do ?
" Hence," Goethe continues, "even scientific men
have at all times had an impulse to recognise
living things as such, to grasp connectedly their
external visible and tangible parts, and take
these as indications of the inner life, and thus in
a sense to compass the whole in one glance."
"Hence we find at the threshold of art and know-
ledge and science a number of attempts to
establish and elaborate a science that we may
call morphology."
Perhaps Goethe's meaning can be realised best
if one takes a great work of art say, the Venus
of Milo and imagines how these different kinds
of knowledge would deal with it. Purely ana-
lytic anatomy would dissolve the superb artistic
192 HAECKEL
form into a rubbish -heap of bits of marble.
Chemistry would still further break up these bits
of marble into the chemical elements of which
every block of marble is ultimately composed.
The "form" would disappear altogether. But in
this case the form means the Venus of Milo.
We see at once that we need another branch of
science and investigation besides anatomy and
chemistry: we need a morphology, or science of
the complete form in which the block of marble
is moulded into the Venus of Milo. In the case of
our work of art, morphology would be identical with
aesthetics, or at least with a branch of it. There
can be no doubt that the first and most imperative
need for the establishment of a special science of
morphology arises from artistic and aesthetic
feelings. It is not without significance that it
was founded by the poet Goethe, and elaborated
with such great success in the nineteenth century
by the born artist Haeckel. However, that does
not prevent the analogy of the Venus of Milo,
which happens to be a creation of human art,
being applied equally to every individualised form
in nature, to every crystal, plant, and animal.
Goethe himself immediately transferred his mor-
phology into the province of botany with such
vigour that the term is still regarded, in its
narrower sense, as a technical botanical expression.
It extends, however, to the whole world in so
far as its contents come before us in " forms."
When Haeckel adopted the term he deliberately
restricted it, in harmony with the general definition,
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 193
by calling his work the " Morphology of Organ-
isms," or the science of the forms of animals and
plants.
But there was one danger in the conception
of a morphology of animals and plants, namely,
the danger of taking it to mean a purely external
description : so many thousand species of plants,
soberly described, labelled, and numbered, a huge
cabinet of stuffed skins, a herbarium of hay. A
whole scientific school had really taken it in this
sense since Goethe's time ; much as if one were to
think aesthetics consisted simply in forming an
illustrated catalogue of all the art-treasures in the
world, a realistic catalogue in which the marble
statues from the Parthenon and the Moses of
Michael Angelo would simply be given as number
so-and-so in class so-and-so.
Haeckel was preserved from this school by his
more immediate masters, as well as by G-oethe
himself; firstly by Johannes Miiller, then by the
botanist Schleiden, finally by the influence of
G-egenbaur. There was at the time enough, and
more than enough, of this external museum-
morphology. It was far from Haeckel's intention
to produce a new compendium, in several volumes,
of this kind of science of plants and animals.
His morphology was to be "general," to have a
broader range, be a programme. As Eichard
Hertwig said very happily at a later date, he
saw his science, not as it then was, but as it ought
to be, in his opinion.
The science of forms was to be in the fullest sense
13
194 HAECKEL
a " philosophy of forms." " Zoological philosophy"
was the name given by the hapless Lamarck, in
France a century ago, to a work that appeared in
the year that Darwin was born, and anticipated
his most advanced thoughts. Haeckel, also, gave
anew " philosophy of zoology and botany." The
title embodies the magic formula that gave him
courage to take up resolutely once more the
proscribed word, that seemed to have been scalded
and spoiled for ever in the witches' cauldron of
" natural philosophy " ; it spoke of the " theory of
descent as reformed by Charles Darwin." Two
sub-titles divided the work into two sections from
the start. The first part was, the critical elements
of the mechanical science of the developed forms
of organisms (animal and plant) : the second part
was, the same elements of the mechanical science
of the developing forms of organisms.
In these titles we see the decisive advance
beyond Johannes Miiller. As Goethe had already
declared, morphology as such can be formed into
a real and profound science. It will then not
confine itself pedantically to a registration of forms.
It will compare them with each other, and seek
the hidden law in the straggling phenomena. It
will mark out broad lines that will enable the
human mind to grasp its objects in all their fulness.
Johannes Miiller had only been able to confirm
that in the narrower sphere of biology. This was
the nerve that gave vitality to zoology and botany,
and made them a province of the mind in the
higher sense. But the question now was : which
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 195
laws were detected, and in which category of
thought were they to be found ? Miiller had the
theory, but was weak on the practical side. There
were the " forms" of animals and plants. What
was it that really connected them ? What was
the reality that corresponded to the philosophic
craving of the intelligence ? Miiller' s next school,
the generation immediately preceding Haeckel,
that of Du Bois-Eeymond, Virchow, and many
others, had apparently indicated the solution.
They had replaced Miiller's vague general con-
ception of the laws of morphology and life, which
was undermined by older influences, by a single
great demand. We want to grasp nature as a
unity. At one point in nature we have reached
deep and apparently fundamental factors in
physics and chemistry and their plain natural
laws or forces. Now let us try, starting from
the idea of unity and from the plainest of all
philosophical principles, that of proceeding from
the known to the unknown, to reduce the forms
and phenomena of life to these natural laws of
chemistry and physics. Let us find out whether
the whole form-world of the animals and plants
in other words, the whole province of morphology
in the narrower sense can be traced to the same
natural laws that we have in chemical and physical
phenomena. The globe is the object of chemistry
and physics. Shall these few green or other-
coloured things that lie at the limit of the air,
water, and rocks, a small minority in nature, the
things we call animals and plants, alone in the
196 HAECKEL
whole world be exempt from the action of these
laws ? It is immaterial that Muller's best pupils,
Du Bois in his later years and Virchow at an early
date, departed more or less from this consistent
position of theirs into philosophic and other side-
paths. The younger generation, to which Haeckel
belongs, that only came into direct touch with
Miiller in his last years, heard no other gospel.
What further advance was to be made ? In
chemistry and physics they had before them the
deep stratum that yielded good mechanical laws.
The first stage of physiology after Miiller, as we
find it, for instance, under Du Bois-Eeymond,
yielded some good indications for the organic. But
was the whole of morphology to be remodelled?
Was the vast labyrinth of the thousands and
thousands of animal and plant forms in the
museum to be reduced to mechanical laws, corre-
sponding to those of physics and chemistry, and
be explained by them ?
Darwin brought salvation, Now that he had
appeared, Haeckel felt that he could begin to work.
The hour and the man were come.
Darwin made it possible for him to raise
morphology to a penetrative science, equal to
physics and chemistry, and so to make a step
towards the unity of our knowledge of a unified
world. Hitherto the morphology of the animals
and plants had been in confusion. God, imagined
in the form of a higher man, had deliberately
created the organic forms, the palm, the moss, the
turtle, and the man. He had constructed them on
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 197
a definite plan, as a man makes machines. Now,
it appeared, the deeper stratum was peeping out
even here. Laws that had built the heavens and
the earth reached, by way of the Darwinian theories
of selection and adaptation, to the moss and palm,
the turtle and man.
It was Haeckel's peculiar distinction to take up
this path as the right one. It was then altogether
new ; to-day, even in the eyes of an opponent, it
has at least the solid and consistent support of
a considerable party. In later years, apart from
open deserters from the free and uncompromising
pursuit of truth like Virchow, a school of zoologists
and botanists has been formed that will not re-
cognise in Darwinism a reduction of vital phe-
nomena to the simple chemico-physical laws of
the rest of nature. They look upon it partly as
inaccurate in its allegations of fact, partly as a
nebulous confusion, if not, as I have already said,
as a false mysticism or metaphysic. In the opinion
of these critics, whose own confused ideas very
often leave little to be desired in point of nebulosity,
and who frequently try to drive out the devil by
means of the devil's grandmother (a matter we
cannot go into here), Haeckel had made a great
mistake in thinking that Darwinism would solve
the Du Bois-Virchow problem of reducing all living
things to the laws of lifeless matter. Even these,
however, must candidly acknowledge that in doing
so he was the victim of his consistent and honour-
able inquiry. At all events he must logically have
seen the correct line at that time as it is recognised
198 HAECKEL
to-day by this anti-Darwinian but professedly
mechanical school. His individual error can only
have been that he was deceived as to the true
course of the line, and so clung to Darwinism.
However, we have said enough on this point.
Haeckel himself, at the time he was producing
his greatest work, saw in Darwin the absolute
" open Sesame " to all the doors of philosophic
morphology. With this Sesame came an entirely
new impulse, namely, to write the natural history
of the animal and plant form. It was just the
same as when aesthetics perceives a new world,
a world that alone is worthy of it, the moment it
passes from the making of a mere catalogue of the
world's art-treasures to the knowledge of even one
single law of artistic creation, in virtue of which
one single work of art has been actually built up.
It is impossible to begin with more general
considerations than this book does. The method
of scientific research generally is explained in
order to give an idea of the new Darwinian mor-
phology. With a calmness that must have made
most of the contemporary zoologists and botanists
shiver, the discredited idea of natural philosophy is
restored from the lumber-room. " All true science
is philosophy, and all true philosophy is science.
And in this sense all true science is natural
philosophy."
The various periods in the development of
morphology are coolly schematised. These epochs
are characterised by the vicissitudes of the struggle
between the simple description of forms in the
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 199
animal and plant worlds and the philosophic
exposition of the laws that lie behind these forms.
In the eighteenth century, under Linne, there is
a period of purely external description and classi-
fication. It is succeeded in the first third of the
nineteenth century by a triumph of the philosophic
treatment of animal and plant forms. This in-
creases with Goethe and Lamarck, and grows into
the older (and now generally abused) imaginative
natural philosophy. Then there is a general
reaction ; with Cuvier comes the least philoso-
phical of methods, though at the time it is a real
advance. While Linne only gave an external
description of forms and catalogued them, Cuvier's
epoch penetrated to the inner structure, the inner
world of forms, and thus rendered great service.
The last and greatest workers of the period,
Miiller, Schleiden, &c., give the signal for a re-
action in the hour of its chief triumph. Haeckel
now follows this up as "the element of fact in
their ideas." With Darwin he inaugurates the
fourth epoch, the triumph of natural philosophy
for the second time. But it is now far deeper and
clearer; it embodies all the good that preceded,
all that Cuvier and his followers have done, without
the irresolution of earlier days. Now that we have
studied the living form in its innermost structure,
as was never done before, in the earliest stages
of embryonic development in the ovum and womb,
in the past geological periods of the earth's history,
we will think over this form, think with all the
means at our command, reason, synthesis even
200 HAECKEL
imagination, when it is necessary to press on to
the great final conclusion, a new synthesis of the
defective positive data. What does Johannes
Miiller say ? " Imagination is an indispensable
servant ; it is by means of it we make the
combinations that lead to important discoveries.
The man of science needs, in harmonious co-
operation, the discriminating force of the analytic
intelligence and the generalising force of the
synthetic imagination." That is spoken from
the depths of Haeckel's heart, and he drives it
home.
Nothing is more amusing than to find Haeckel's
later opponents saying, apropos of any particular
question, that his statement springs from his
" imagination," as if it were something wholly un-
scientific that the naturalist must shun like the
pest ; or again, that Haeckel here or there falls a
victim to the deadly enemy of all scientific re-
search, natural philosophy. It is pointed out to
him as a great discovery which he must approach
in a proper penitential spirit to him who has
discussed these matters so unequivocally in his
first theoretical work.
As a fact, these methodological chapters in the
first volume are as clear as crystal. The titles
will seem strange to the man who thinks he can
do without any philosophical instruction in zoology
and botany, and wants to hear only of cells,
tissues, stalks, leaves, bones, scales, and so on,
in a general morphology. One chapter has the
heading : " Empiricism and Philosophy (Experi-
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 201
ence and Knowledge)." Another heading runs :
" Analysis and Synthesis. " Then there are :
" Induction and Deduction," "Dogmatism and
Criticism," " Teleology and Causality (Vitalism
and Mechanism)," " Dualism and Monism." The
last three antithetic headings are united under a
general title as " Critique of Scientific Methods
that are Mutually Exclusive." Such a title illu-
mines the whole situation like a flash of lightning.
Many years afterwards Haeckel himself said of his
General Morphology that it was a comprehensive
and difficult work that had found few readers. At
least the whole of this first and most difficult part
of the book must be defended against the criticism
of its parent. If it is far from adequately appre-
ciated to-day, especially by professional philoso-
phers, that is certainly not due to its style, which is
a model of clearness in the eyes of any one with the
least philosophical culture. The real evil was that
people did not look to it for instruction from the
philosophical side. The title, " Morphology of
Organisms," had a technical sound. The empty
space between professional philosophy and pro-
fessional zoology is wide enough to-day, but it
was far wider thirty-four years ago. Books like
Biichner's superficial and popular Force and
Matter, or Haeckel's own later work, the History
of Creation, that can only be regarded as a brief
and incomplete popular extract in comparison with
the General Morphology, with all its peculiar
literary charm, stole into the philosophy of the
time like foxes with burning straw tied to their
202 HAECKEL
tails. Professional philosophers have written
whole libraries on them. The matter recalls a
fundamental defect in academic philosophy: it
has little or no sympathy with real scientific
work ; in fact, it studiously avoids such sympathy
in the consciousness of its own weakness. Hence
it has, like every other layman with general inter-
ests, to wait for attempts to popularise scientific
work before it can know what is going on
in the serious camp. The man who wants to-day
to criticise the mechanical conception of nature
should first make himself acquainted with these
chapters of the Morphology. How many know
the mere title of the work? How many even
of those who evince great hostility whenever
Haeckel's name is mentioned?
The book contains much more than the metho-
dological introduction. This only takes up the first
hundred pages, but it contains the whole pro-
gramme. We start off, therefore, under full sail
for a new epoch of thought, for natural philosophy ;
but we must keep an alert mind. The deeper
task, that Darwin only gave the means of accom-
plishing, was to reduce all living things, animal
or vegetal, to the inorganic. The laws of life
must be merely certain complications of the
simple laws that are encountered directly in
chemistry and physics, and rule throughout
nature. It must be one of the first aims of a
general philosophic morphology to open out a
path in this direction.
The living and what is called the " dead " must
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 203
be compared. Linne's three rigid kingdoms
animal, plant, and mineral needed definitions in
harmony with the new ideas. Haeckel himself
had discovered the " monera," the living particles
of plasm that did not seem to have reached the
stage of the true cell. Here, clearly, was the
lowest level of the living. At the same time we
reach the most complex specimen of the inorganic
from the morphological point of view that is to
say, the most interesting in its individual form
the crystal. The differences begin to give way.
What marvellously similar functions ! From the
dead mother- water is built up, purely by chemico-
physical laws, the beautiful structure of the crystal.
From the lowest living particle of plasm without
any special organs, as we see in the radiolaria,
are formed the beautiful siliceous frames that
Haeckel had collected in such quantities at Mes-
sina. Is it more than a hair's breadth to pass from
one to the other ? The deeper we go in the study
of living things, the slighter become the differences
that separate them from " dead matter." On the
other hand, the higher we go in the structure of
crystals, the more striking is the resemblance to
the living thing. Two chains of thought seem to
be started. What we call " dead " is really alive :
what we call living is really subject to the same
laws as the " dead." The solution is found in
complete Monism. Living and dead are not
antithetic. Nature is one ; though we see it in
different stages of development. We call one of
them the crystal, another the cell, or the inoneron,
204 HAECKEL
or the protozoon; another the plant, another the
animal. Historically it all hangs together. The
same laws hold sway throughout. In framing my
arbitrary definitions I can say either that the dead
is living, or that the living does not differ
essentially from the dead. In the chain of living
things man comes from the primitive cell, the
moneron. This in its turn has developed from
something earlier " naturally" developed. The
very idea of life forces us to seek the predecessors
of the monera. Hence we speak of " spontaneous
generation," as what was dead according to our
ordinary use of language has begun to live. In
point of fact it is merely development of a unified
whole. There is no gap, no leap, no act that is
not natural. The dead and the living never were
really antithetic.
The insistent statement that not only does the
living approach the inorganic, but the inorganic
approaches the living, is quite " Haeckelian."
The study of the " life " of crystals is one of the
best parts of the book. Later generations will
appreciate it. We are much too narrow to-day
when we merely reflect that life, even the life of
man, can be traced by evolution down to what we
call dead matter. We forget that this " matter"
is already high, since it potentially contains life,
and even man, the crown of life. Many people
imagine that the derivation of man from "dead
matter " is equal to turning a king into a beggar.
They do not reflect that, on the other hand, a
beggar is turned into a king. When I say that life
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 205
arose one day out of the inorganic, or that a crystal
was turned into a cell, my statement really involves
the complementary truth that the inorganic poten-
tially contains life in itself. Otherwise we have
the old miracle over again of something being pro-
duced out of nothing, in spite of our spontaneous
generation. Haeckel has always been clear on this
point. His later studies of the soul of the atom
and the plastidule only carry out the absolutely
logical treatment of the question that we find in
these chapters of the first volume of the Morpho-
logy.
Incidentally the question is raised whether the
plant or the animal was evolved first. Animal and
plant are, of course, not rigidly distinct from each
other. They are only the two great branches of
the Darwinian evolution of living forms, and are
united at the bottom, however much they diverge
above. Gegenbaur had represented this years
before (1860) in a figure that Haeckel quotes in
his Monograph on the Eadiolaria in 1862. The
whole kingdom of living things must be conceived
" as a connected series, within which we find two
lines diverging from a common centre and repre-
senting a gradual differentiation and development
of organisation." The terminal points of these
lines (the highest plant and the highest animal)
are very different from each other, but the dif-
ference gradually disappears as we go back towards
the common centre, and the lowest stages in each
kingdom can hardly be distinguished from each
other. For these lowest stages Haeckel now
206 HAECKEL
carries out a plan that very quickly forced itself
on him.
He forms them into a new kingdom of life. To
the animal and plant kingdoms he adds the primi-
tive realm of the beings that showed unequivocal
signs of the possession of life, yet were neither
animals nor plants. He gives them the name of
" Protists." To botany and zoology is now added
protistology.
The name "protists" (from protiston, the very
first) is familiar to every one in biology to-day. If
protistology has not yet been securely established
as a special branch of science, that is due to the
circumstance that a strict limit cannot be deter-
mined on either the plant or the animal side, so
that the botanist encroaches on the province at
one point and the zoologist at another. But when
we remember that Haeckel's protists include the
well-known bacilli, on which whole libraries are
accumulating to-day, it is clear that the province
must be definitely marked off at some date in the
near future, whether one accepts Darwinism or no.
These important innovations in technical biology
show very clearly how sound and fruitful the new
4 'natural philosophy " was. We have to go back
to the untenable and utterly impracticable systems
of Hegel, Schelling, and SteSen, which were
immediately rejected as the trifling of dilettanti, or
even to much that the admirable Oken did on the
scientific side, if we would measure the whole
distance between what people understood in the
sixties by " natural philosophy " and the real
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 207
reformed philosophy that Haeckel gave to the
world. This becomes clearer at every step we take
in his work.
The first book has determined the method that
leads to morphology, the science of forms. The
second has ranged the organic forms protists,
plants, and animals over against the inorganic or
" dead " forms, as far as this is possible from the
new evolutionary point of view. We feel that the
third book will pass on to Darwin, and explain the
world of organic forms by the Darwinian laws of
evolution. Then the programme would be carried
out in its main features.
But Haeckel writes two whole books before he
comes to this, and they are, perhaps, the most
characteristic in the work. He only " adopted "
the theory of evolution in the sense that he applied
it far more thoroughly than Darwin to practical
problems. In these two books he is entirely him-
self. They are, at the same time, the most diffi-
cult in the work. Even to-day they place him on
a lofty and lonely height apart from the great and
strenuous controversy over Darwinism. I believe
that the time will yet come that will fully appre-
ciate these books. Through them Haeckel will
play a part in philosophy of which we have at
present no prevision.
There is a word that is inseparable from the
word " form " individuality. Morphology, which
does not analyse, but studies the form-unities as a
whole in the sense of Goethe's definition, comes
from the nature of things to deal with the indi-
208 HAECKEL
vidual. In our artistic illustration the Venus of
Milo, as a form-unity, is an aesthetic individuality.
When its form is destroyed, its individuality
perishes.
Let us apply this to any one of the higher
plants or animals. Take a turtle, for instance. A
definite individual embodies the definite form to
which I give the name. This form as such is
entirely lost if I cut up the turtle until it is un-
recognisable. The limit of morphological study
seems to be, just as in the case of the Venus of
Milo, the integrity of the individual turtle. Yet
in the living turtle we find an enormous difference.
If I grind the Venus of Milo into dust, I am at
once in a totally different world with this dust. I
am amongst the raw material of nature, untouched
by aesthetic influence. Prom this calcareous powder
I can, in reality or imagination, pass on to the
world of crystals, molecules, and atoms. In that
case I shall have done with aesthetic morphology.
I come to the morphology of the inorganic, a very
different branch. What do we find in the case of
the living turtle ?
It is true that I can break up the turtle into
simple chemical substances. In that case I make
the same transition ; I abandon organic morpho-
logy, and pass, with the same salto mortale as in
the case of the Venus of Milo, to the lower science
of inorganic morphology.
But when I examine the structure of the living
individual turtle before me I notice a special
feature. Let us suppose that I break up the Venus
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 209
of Milo only to a certain degree; or, with less
vandalism, I do not break it up, but light up its
inner structure to some extent by a sort of Rontgen-
ray apparatus. And suppose I found that this one
aesthetic individuality is made up of millions of
much smaller and aesthetically finer and more unified
images. I do not mean of millions of repetitions
of the large Venus in miniature, but of real and
unmistakable little works of art, each of which,
regarded separately and without any injury to its
narrower individuality, might be just as excellent
a subject for aesthetic examination as the whole
Venus.
This is, of course, nonsense as regards the Venus
of Milo. There is nothing of the kind in it. I
have given the paradoxical supposition merely for
the purpose of showing what we really find in the
case of the turtle.
When the organic individual turtle is closely
studied it breaks up first into so many simpler
organic individuals, which undoubtedly belong as
such to the province of organic morphology. They
are the cells. The theory of Schleiden, Schwann,
and Virchow here comes into direct touch with
morphology. Every higher animal or plant has
its own individuality ; and within this individuality
there is a conglomerate, a community, or a state, of
individuals of a lower order, that have their own
life and their corresponding individual life-form.
Man himself, the highest of animals, is a cell-state.
So Virchow taught. Each one of us is an in-
dividual, and as such an object of morphology.
14
210 HAECKEL
The cell, each single cell in each of us, is also an
individual, and as such is equally an object of
morphology. Hence it is the task of the morpho-
logy of organisms, not only to describe these higher
individualities as such, but also to look on them as
glass-houses, as it were, with so many shelves,
divisions, and smaller houses within of a lower
rank. These internal arrangements have to be
described, piece by piece, with the same fidelity.
This will probably suffice to convey a general
idea of the subject. Clearly, the great work that
ought to form the general part of morphology at
this point was the precise determination of all
these various layers of individuality that are found
in the animals, plants, and protists, and, as we
rise upward, enter into more and more complex
relations to each other.
The difference between, say, a turtle or a man
and the cell which combines in its millions to
form them is not the only one. Between them
we seemed to find individualised, or almost indi-
vidualised, links. Think of the idea of an organ.
What is my heart ? It is made of a number of
cell-individuals, like my whole frame. But these
cells form a sort of intermediate individuality in
me. We may go further. What is a segment
of a worm? What is an arm of a star-fish?
They have so much independence that they can
continue to live, rapidly producing new cells and
forming a new 'worm or star-fish of the higher
individual type, if they are cut off. The arrange-
ment is still more difficult in the case of the
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 211
plant. Where in their case shall we find the
stages of individuality that correspond to the
animal-human ? The cells are distinct in both
cases. The individual plant-cell corresponds to
the individual animal-cell. But what is there in
the plant that corresponds to me, as the animal-
human multicellular individual ? Does the oak-
tree, for instance ? Certainly, the oak is an
individual. But it seems that it is the single
sprout of it that corresponds to what I am.
What is the^ relation of the tree to this sprout ?
Here our ideas grow dim and confused. We
human^ individuals unite to form certain higher
communities. The word " social " reminds us of
the fact : then we have the nation, the race,
humanity. At least the earlier of these stages
certainly perform various combined functions,
and are understood to form, or wish to form,
new individuals. We speak of the social organism,
the body of the people, the soul of the people,
and so on.
We see that still more clearly in the case of
the animals about us. Individuals, that corre-
spond to our conception of an individual man,
combine and form stocks and colonies, with
division of labour. We find this in the medusae,
corals, anemones, tunicates, and vermalians. One
of these animal stocks, to which our human social
combinations only correspond in a much wider
sense, gives us a stage that is represented by
the tree in the plant-world. Infinite perspectives
open out, and also infinite complications. Infinite
212 HAECKEL
problems spring up for morphology to deal with;
it must make its way through the labyrinth of
these complicated types of individualisation.
The matter is still more intricate if I begin
at the bottom of the biological series and proceed
upwards. I, man, am an individual of a certain
stage in my own collective activity. It is true
that I am made up of millions of cell-individuals,
but when we look at the whole these are merely
elementary units. But take a being from the
protist-world that is too lowly to be either animal
or plant. In respect of its whole activity it is an
individual just as much as I am, and therefore
in this regard at the same stage as I. At the
same time it consists of a single cell. The dis-
tinction in me between unit and whole does not
exist in it. Its unit is the whole. It would seem
a Sisyphean task to reduce all this to a system.
Yet that is just what Haeckel has done.
With crystalline clearness he separates and
reunites and arranges everything, from the
primitive organic individual, that is not yet a
true cell the monera he had himself discovered
upward. Organic morphology begins with them
as its first object, the first complete individuality,
the first " form." All that lies below it is beyond
the province of morphology. The last conceivable
organic individuality is, perhaps, the atom ; and
that is not the concern of morphology. We start
from the organic. Above the pre-cellular indivi-
duals and the true cells the next form-unities are
the organs. Above the organs, after a few subtle
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 213
intermediate stages, are the " persons." Thus a
new word is given to what we have hitherto
conventionally called an " individual," when we
wanted to denote a turtle, a bird, a man, or an
higher animal as a whole. To this corresponds
in the plant the sprout. The stage above the
" person" is the " stock." We might also call it
the social individual ; in the plant-world it is
the tree, in the coral the coral-stock, in the human
case the social combination of a number of men
for common action.
We are reminded of Virchow's speech, and how
" consciousness " was dragged into the debate
on the cell-state. What psychological perspectives
are opened out by this doctrine of individuality !
Each form-unity, each single individuality in the
series, with a soul ! Souls combining for common
action, and forming higher psychic unities! There
is no detail in Haeckel's whole life-work in which
he speaks more boldly and freely and philosophi-
cally than he does here. His lucid treatment raises
to a higher stage a philosophic question that has
occupied thinkers for ages.
That is the third book. The fourth takes up
a different subject. Let us adopt in organic
morphology this wonderful theory of individuality,
the theory of stages within the form. Then let
us turn to consider impartially the vast multi-
tude of living forms. How can we now arrange
this infinite confusion by merely looking at it ?
Artificial classification has attempted it a
hundred times, and always without success. On
214 HAECKEL
this side there is only one way to proceed the
mathematical.
I study them with strictly mathematical figures.
I determine their axes, and the mathematical
aspects of their forms. Possibly that will give
a practical result ; the only kind of artificial system
that can be accommodated with the Darwinian
theory, and perhaps render it assistance by the
sharpness of its lines. Does it answer ? Take a
crystal, a specimen from inorganic morphology.
The description of it is susceptible of a strictly
mathematical form. Now take a star-fish, a worm,
a human being. We find that even these organic
structures have a mysterious relation at bottom
to certain mathematical, stereometric forms. We
might almost say, to certain forms of human
thought. Everything in the organic world is in a
state of flux. But through the whole moving
stream we can trace the outline of one stable
element, something like a mathematical idea. A
sort of Platonism of the living forms vaguely takes
shape.
Haeckel speaks of lines, axes, circles, radii, and
all kinds of rhythmic structures. It does seem that
the countless individual forms of living things fit
into a scheme of a limited number of mathematical
forms. Strictly speaking this is not a real mor-
phology of living things. We only find these clear
and rigid forms schematically in the wild profu-
sion of forms of the protists, plants, and animals.
They are only a reminiscence of the laws of the
purely inorganic, which the eye of the observer
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 215
just detects as the lowest stratum. Hence
Haeckel calls this section the " promorphology "
of organisms.
It is true that this section, which essays to
compress all living things into a very simple
scheme, is the hardest to read in the whole work.
A number of strange and difficult words have to
be invented for this stereometric scheme to which
he would reduce the animal and plant forms.
Haeckel himself declared, twenty years afterwards
(in the second part of the Monograph on the Radio-
laria), that this stereometry of organic forms had
found little favour in biology " especially on
account of the difficult and complicated nomen-
clature." But he had complete confidence as to
the substance of it, even after so great a lapse of
time.
In point of fact we have here, it seems to me,
a gigantic preparatory work, not so much for the
strict purpose of classification, as for a real
philosophy of botany and zoology that will be
founded some day. This recurrence of sharp
stereometric structures, not only in the crystal,
but also, if less clearly, in the biological world,
will one day prove an important source of know-
ledge, in a sense that is not even clear in
Haeckel himself.
We are already entering upon a period that
has a glimpse of the truth that the deepest power
of Beethoven's music, or Goethe's poetry, or
Raphael's painting, or Michael Angelo's sculpture
is a mysterious revelation of the most subtle mathe-
216 HAECKEL
matical relations and effects produced without
conscious perception of these relations, though a
human mind is at work in them. In spite of all
our " consciousness," the obscure intuitive power
at work in these human artistic achievements
differs very little from the curious force with
which a radiolarian builds up its little house in the
deep sea or a caseworm fits on its fine, rhythmic,
snail-like coat. In both we have the same pro-
found, crystal-like constructive power that brought
forth the wings of the butterfly, the feathers of
the bird, the bodily frame of all the animals and
plants, that harmonises so well with strict mathe-
matical forms. In Beethoven and Raphael it is
not more conscious or unconscious, not clearer or
vaguer, not more mystical or more natural, than
in the poorest worm or the microscopically small
radiolarian. The aesthetics of the twentieth cen-
tury will take up these ideas.
It is a great work. How few there are in the
whole of the nineteenth century that show the
wealth of ideas we find in the first volume alone.*
And this is only one volume. We have as yet
said nothing of the idea that is of the greatest
* The reader may be interested to know that Haeckel gives
a popular summary of his early work on individuality and on
the mathematical types of organisms in a more recent work.
This has been translated into English with the title TJie
Wonders of Life. The two chapters that deal with these
questions are omitted from the abridged cheap edition.
[Trans.]
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 217
consequence in connection with Haeckel's own
development. He was a Darwinian from 1862
onwards. After 1866 and the publication of
the General Morphology we find him dominated
in all his work by one single idea from the
Darwinian group. He brought this idea so
effectively to the front, improved and developed
it so assiduously, and applied it in so many ways,
that it has come to be regarded as his own most
characteristic work. It is inseparable from his
name. Whatever the future may be, wherever
Haeckel's name is uttered people will add the
phrase that was made peculiarly his after 1866,
that colours and pervades all his works technical,
popular, polemical, or philosophical as much as
the word " Monism." It is the phrase : the bio-
genetic law.
Here and there even in the first volume of the
Morphology a note is struck that the reader cannot
clearly understand. It increases in the second
volume until it dominates the whole book,
The phrase is known far and wide to-day. This
is partly due to HaeckePs own insistence on it,
but perhaps still more to the real value of the
idea itself. It crops up in a hundred different
fields psychology, ethics, philosophy, even in art
and aesthetics. I have been able to trace it even
into modern mysticism. For the moment I will
only point out that it has been attacked and
misstated with real fanaticism, in spite of the
splendid and perfectly clear account of it that
Haeckel has given.
218 HAECKEL
The proper place to read of it is, as I said, the
second volume of the Morphology. This volume
has to give an account of the evolution of organic
forms. What is given rather casually, almost
Socratically, in Darwin is now developed into a
number of strict laws. This method of expounding
more or less hypothetical, new, and insecure ideas
in the form of laws has since been frequently
attacked. Some have been led by it to take the
ideas as so many dogmas, and even to learn
the laws by heart as if they were texts in Scripture.
Others have then laid the blame of this dogma-
tic interpretation on Haeckel himself. It is quite
true that there was the possibility of a misunder-
standing. People do not always think for
themselves, and the statement of a proposition
in the form of a law may prove a pitfall for them.
The blind learning of them by heart is always
mischievous. On the other hand, it might be urged
that the statement of the ideas in this bald way
affords the best opportunity for a thorough and
rational criticism of them, precisely because they
give such pregnant expression to the writer's
meaning. I do not find that order and strict
logical definitions have ever done any harm of
themselves, whatever it is that is put in order
and defined. On the contrary. People must
confuse order sometimes with real dogmatism.
Of this there is not a word in the whole book,
while at an important juncture the reader is
actually warned to be on his guard against undue
pressure. " In this," we read in the twentieth
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 219
chapter, "we do not wish to draw up a body of
laws of organic morphology, but to give hints and
suggestions for drawing them up. A science that
is yet only in its cradle, like the morphology of
organisms, will have many important changes
to undergo before it can venture to claim for its
general propositions the rank of absolute and
unexceptionable natural laws."
However that may be, it was in this provisional
definition of laws that the famous biogenetic law
first took shape, and with it a spirit entered into
Darwinism in the narrower sense that was never
again detached from its master, Haeckel.
Let us once more take a simple illustration from
facts. Take a green aquatic frog and a fish, say
a pike.
Both of them have a solid vertebral column in
their frames, and therefore both must be classed
amongst the vertebrates. But within the limits
of this group they differ very considerably from
each other. The frog has four well-developed
legs, its body terminates in a tail, and it breathes
by means of lungs, like a bird, a dog, or a human
being. The fish has fins, it swims in the water
by means of these fins and its long rudder-like
tail, and it breathes the air contained in the water
by means of gills. When we arrange the verte-
brates in a series, with man at their head, it is
perfectly clear that the frog stands higher than the
fish in regard to its whole structure. It is lower
than the lizard, the bird, or the mammal, but at
the same time it is a little nearer to these three than
220 HAECKEL
the fish is. That was recognised long ago by Linne,
who assigned them a corresponding rank. The
fishes are the lowest group of the vertebrates ; the
frogs belong to the group immediately above them.
Now let us see how one of these frogs is developed
to-day. The frogs are oviparous (egg-laying)
animals. The mother frog lays her eggs in the
water, and in the ordinary course of nature a new
little frog develops from each of these eggs. But
the object that develops from them is altogether
different from the adult frog.
This object is the familiar tadpole. At first it
has no legs, but it has a long oar-like tail,
with which it can make its way briskly in the
water. It breathes in the water by means of gills
just like a fish. It is only when the tadpole grows
four legs, loses its tail, closes up the gills at its
throat, and begins to breathe by the mouth and
lungs instead, that it becomes a real frog. There
can be no doubt whatever that the tadpole is very
much more like the fish in all the most important
particulars than the frog. Between the frog-egg
and the frog itself we have a stage of development
in each individual case of which we might almost
say that the young frog has first to turn into a
fish before it can become a frog.
How are we to explain this ?
At first people supposed something like the
following : All beings in nature are admirably
adapted to their environment and their life-con-
ditions. Whatever be the explanation of it, it is
a simple fact. Now, the frog lays its eggs in the
THE ' GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 221
water. The young ones develop from these eggs,
and find themselves in the water. The most
practical adaptation for them is to swim about by
means of a tail and breathe by means of gills like the
fish. They do not reach land until later, and they
creep on to it and have an equipment of the oppo-
site character, with legs and lungs.
But this explanation throws no light on the
question why the frog lays its eggs in the water.
However, there might be some utility or other,
some need for protection, for instance, in that.
Let us take a few other cases.
There are several species of tree-frogs, and toads,
and closely related amphibia like the salamanders,
that do not lay their eggs in the water. Some
of them bury them in folds of their own external
skin, others (such as the Alpine salamander) retain
them within the mother's body, as the mammals do.
The young animals develop there from the eggs.
Even there, however, where there is no question
of aquatic life, the young frogs, toads, and sala-
manders first assume the fish-form. The young
frogs and toads have fin-like tails, and all of them
have gills. There seems to be some internal law
of development that forces the frog and its relatives
to pass through the fish-stage in their individual
evolution even when there is no trace whatever
of any external utility.
Now let us examine the matter as Darwinians
and believers in evolution.
There are reasons on every hand for believing
that the frogs and salamanders, which now stand
222 HAECKEL
higher in classification than the fishes, were
developed from the fishes in earlier ages in the
course of progressive evolution. Once upon a time
they were fishes. If that is so, the curious
phenomenon we have been considering really
means that each young frog resembles its fish-
ancestors. In each case to-day the frog's egg first
produces the earlier or ancestral stage, the fish.
It then develops rapidly into a frog. In other
words, the individual development recapitulates
an important chapter of the earlier history of the
whole race of frogs. Putting this in the form of
a law, it runs : each new individual must, in its
development, pass rapidly through the form of its
parents' ancestors before it assumes the parent form
itself. If a new individual frog is to be developed,
and if the ancestors of the whole frog-stem were
fishes, the first thing to develop from the frog's egg
will be a fish, and it will only later assume the form
of a frog.
That is a simple and pictorial outline of what
we mean when we speak of "the biogenetic law."
We need, of course, much more than the one
frog-fish fact before we can erect it into a law.
But we have only to look round us, and we find
similar phenomena as common as pebbles.
Let us bear in mind that evolution proceeded
from certain amphibia to the lizards, and from
these to the birds and mammals. That is a long
journey, but we have no alternative. If the
amphibia (such as the frog and the salamander)
descend from the fishes, all the higher classes up
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 223
to man himself must also have done so. Hence
the law must have transmitted even to ourselves
this ancestral form of the gill-breathing fish.
* What a mad idea, many will say ; that man
should at one time be a tadpole like the frog !
And yet there's no help in prayer, as Falstafi
said even the human germ or embryo passes
through a stage in the womb at which it shows
the outline of gills on the throat just like a fish.
It is the same with the dog, the horse, the
kangaroo, the duck-mole, the bird, the crocodile,
the turtle, the lizard; they all have the same
structure. Nor is this an isolated fact. From the
fish was evolved the amphibian; from this came
the lizard; from the lizard, on Darwinian principles,
the bird. The lizard has solid teeth in its mouth ;
the bird has no teeth in its beak. That is to say,
it has none to-day ; but it had when it was a
lizard. Here, then, we have an intermediate
stage between the fish and the bird. We must
expect that the bird-embryo in the egg will show
some trace of it. As a matter of fact it does so.
When we examine young parrots in the egg we
find that they have teeth in their mouths before
the bill is formed. When the fact was first
discovered, the real intermediate form between the
lizard and the bird was not known. It was
afterwards discovered at Solenhofen in a fossil
impression from the Jurassic period. This was
the archeopteryx, which had feathers like a real
bird, and yet had teeth in its mouth like the lizard
when it lived on earth. The instance is instructive
224 HAECKEL
in two ways. In the first place it shows that we
were quite justified in drawing our conclusions as
to the past from the bird's embryonic form, even if
the true transitional form between the lizard and
the bird were never discovered at all. In the
second place, we see in the young bird in the egg
the reproduction of two consecutive ancestral
stages : one in the fish-gills, the other in the
lizard-like teeth. Once the law is admitted, there
can be nothing strange in this. If one ancestral
stage, that of the fish, is reproduced in the young
animal belonging to a higher group, why not
several ? why not all of them ? No doubt the
ancestral series of the higher forms is of enormous
length. What an immense number of stages there
must have been before the fish ! And then we
have still the amphibian, the lizard, and the bird
or mammal, up to man.
Why should not the law run : the whole ancestral
series must be reproduced in the development of
each individual organism ? We are now in a
position to see the whole bearing of Haeckel's idea,
and at the same time to appreciate his careful
restrictions of it.
First, let us see a little of the history of the
matter. In the first third of the nineteenth
century a number of pre- Darwinian ideas of
evolution flitted about like ghosts in natural
philosophy, as I have already said. The evo-
lutionary ideas of Goethe and Lamarck are well
known to-day. Another thinker of great influence
was Lorentz Oken, who established the custom of
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 225
holding scientific congresses. Oken had been
constantly occupied with embryology, the science
of the development of the individual organism.
He was at all events acquainted with all that was
known at the time on the subject. I open an old
volume, wretchedly printed on blotting-paper, of
Oken's General Natural History for all Headers
(1833), and turn to a passage in the fourth volume
(the first to be issued) on page 470.
We read that the caterpillar of the butterfly
resembles the animal form at a stage of develop-
ment that lies below the insect the worm. Oken
says: " There is no doubt that we have here a
striking resemblance, and one that justifies us
in thinking that the development in the ovum is
merely a repetition of the story of the creation of
the animal groups." Oken was quite aware that
the chick in the egg had gill-slits like the fish.
He bases his idea on that fact. He was very close
indeed to the theory that Haeckel has so wonder-
fully elaborated. However, he was greeted with
laughter. His theory was treated as an absurdity
from 1833 to 1866. It cannot be denied that he
was himself partly to blame for this. Oken made
two serious mistakes. On both points Haeckel is
perfectly clear and sound. Moreover, the theory
of natural evolution that made it possible for us to
speak of " ancestors " was still a Cinderella in the
days of Oken. No sooner was it rehabilitated than
the principle of the old theory of embryonic forms
returned once more.
Darwin himself at once appealed to it, but it
15
226 HAECKEL
was reserved for Haeckel to develop its full
importance. He corrected it in two particulars.
Oken and his admirers had made an unfortunate
mistake. They believed in a genealogical tree of
all living things, but they conceived it on the lines
of the old classification. Linne had enumerated
in succession: mammals, birds, amphibia, fishes,
insects, and worms. He put them in one straight
line, which is certainly the best arrangement for
general purposes. But when Oken came with the
idea of natural evolution, he at once took this
series as the outline of a genealogical tree. The
mammals descended from the birds ; the fishes
from the insects ; and so on. If that were really
the case, the highest animals would be expected to
reproduce all the animal and plant stages in the
course of their embryonic development, on the lines
of the theory. The human being would have to
be, successively, not only a lizard and a fish, but
even a bird, a beetle, a crab, and so on. This was
by no means borne out by the facts, and so the
theory seemed to be discredited.
Now let us glance at Haeckel's genealogical
tables. We find eight of them, artistically drawn,
at the end of the second volume. The " genea-
logical tree" is given in the form of a branching
tree, or as a huge forest-like growth of stems some
of which only meet in the ultimate roots. There
is no trace in Haeckel's designs of the sort of
Eifiel-Tower arrangement that the Linnean system
involved. At the bottom we find the protists, the
most primitive forms of life. From this point two
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 227
parallel stems diverge, that of the animals and
that of the plants ; they never touch each other
after this point, and so cannot be expected to be
reproduced in the embryonic forms. Then the
animal stem is split up almost at the root into at
least five independent branches, each of which
pursues its separate line of development. One
culminates in the insects, above the worms and the
Crustacea. A totally independent stem issues in
the vertebrates, and this in turn breaks into many
different branches. Beyond the lizards, for instance,
we find the development of the mammals and birds,
which run on as separate and parallel lines. It
was mere nonsense to expect a mammal in its
embryonic development to assume the form of
a bird, or a crab, or a beetle, or a mussel, or a
medusa, even if the biogenetic law were estab-
lished ten times over.
The second mistake made by Oken was to
declare that, whatever it cost, the law must be
observed everywhere. He examined the butterfly.
It passed through two curious embryonic stages :
first the caterpillar, then the pupa. The caterpillar
corresponded to the worm ; that might be plausibly
contended. But the pupa also must stand for
something. Between the worm and the insect in
classification was the crustacean. It had a hard
shell : so had the pupa. Consequently, the pupa
is a reproduction of the crustacea-stage. Such
were the bold chess-moves of the older theorist.
Haeckel first established that there was such a
thing as the biogenetic law. There is a funda-
228 HAECKEL
mental norm, which is made clear to us in
embryology and can at the same time (remember
the instance of the lizard-like teeth in the bird-
embryo) give us most wonderful suggestions as to
the line of ancestral development. But it has
certain limitations, as we will now show.
The adaptations in the sense of the Darwinian
laws have affected the animal's embryonic life more
and more, the higher the tree of life grew. The
long recapitulation of the ancestral stages often
came into conflict with the young individual's need
for protection. The result was that the biogenetic
law found itself restricted by the Darwinian laws
of adaptation. The too lengthy succession of an-
cestral portraits was abbreviated and compressed.
Whole stages of embryonic or larval development
were interpolated that had nothing to do with
these ancestral portraits, but were destined for the
protection of the foetus. The butterfly-pupa is
really an instructive instance of this description.
It does not reproduce a crab-stage, nor has there
been any stage in the ancestry of the butterfly
when they lived throughout life in pupa-houses.
The pupa is simply a later adaptation in the
development of the butterfly, a protective stage in
which it accomplishes the transition from the
caterpillar-form in much the same way as the
young bird develops under the protection of the
hard egg-shell. Thus only a faint and shadowy
trace has been left of the real ancestral forms,
though this trace is an extremely instructive one.
But we must not expect the impossible from it.
THE -GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 229
In this way our naked and crude biogenetic law
assumes a more finished and scientific form : the
embryonic development of the individual is a
condensed, abbreviated, and to some extent modi-
fied epitome of the evolutionary history of its
ancestors. That is more modest, but it is a
correct expression of the facts. The essential point
of the older idea was not in itself wrong ; all that
was done was : to explain the gaps, and leaps, and
contradictions in it.
Now that Oken's share in the theory has been
properly appreciated, we may notice another little
historical detail. In the period immediately after
his time these ideas were ridiculed by men of
science, great and small, but they were not exactly
" done to death." Agassiz, the most pronounced
creationist and dualist of all the nineteenth-century
zoologists, expounded them occasionally as a
curious instance of the divine action. In fact, he
looked upon the whole of zoology as a mystic
cabinet of curiosities the more curious the better.
Thus he came to play with this idea and confirm
it, but merely took it at first as a fine figure of
speech. Agassiz is a tragical form. He survived
Darwin, much in the same way that many an
elegant mot-de-salon on the rights of man survived
the French Eevolution. Suddenly the whole struc-
ture of his ideas seemed to fall about him. Where he
had played with roses, he now found torches. He
reeled like a smitten man, and cried out against
the horrid monsters that brought him pain and
bitterness. His anxiety began with Darwin, even
230 HAECKEL
as regarded the question of the embryo. But there
was another, a man far away in South America,
that increased it Fritz Muller.
Born in 1822, one of the finest pioneers in zoo-
logical work, Fritz Muller had wished to become a
higher teacher, but had abandoned his plan on
account of the oath that had to be taken by every
servant of the State. In 1849 he wrote to the
Ministry requesting that he might be allowed to
dispense with the formula " So help me God,
through Jesus Christ." Meeting with a refusal, he
went to South America, and began a solitary life as
a student in the primitive forest, and sought to accu-
mulate valuable zoological material. Darwin called
him " the king of observers." In 1864 he published
an essay of ninety-four pages with the title For
Darwin. He revived and improved the old idea
of Oken^ and made fresh contributions to the
natural history of the Crustacea that were literally
stupefying. We may say that the point that he
believed he had established, in virtue of the law, in
regard to the genealogical tree of the Crustacea,
was afterwards, with apparent justice, called into
question, even by supporters of the law such as
Arnold Lang. That, however, did not diminish
the extent of his influence at the time. Haeckel
has generously acknowledged how strongly he felt
that influence himself. Nevertheless all that has
been said about Haeckel's priority in fully applying
and shaping the law, and in its final formulation,
is perfectly correct.
When Haeckel had massed his material he had
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 231
first to create the necessary terms for arranging it
distinctly. In the language of the old legend, he
called the day day, and the night night. To the
story of ancestral development, or the evolution
of the stem, he gave the name of pliylogeny, or *
stem -history (pJiylon = siem). The word circulates
very widely to-day. The story of the development
of the individual until it reaches maturity was
then called ontogeny (on = being), which coincides
generally with embryology (though it may also
include the growth of the child). The law then
ran : Ontogeny is an abbreviated and frequently
disarranged epitome of phylogeny. Special atten-
tion was drawn to the qualifications " abbreviated "
and " disarranged."
Here again two fresh names were invented. In
so far as the embryonic development is a true
recapitulation of the stem-history, it is called
palingenesis, or repetition of the ancestral traits.
When the development is altered by new adap-
tations it is called cenogenesis, " foreign " or " dis- *
turbing " development.
It has been objected by small-minded critics that
Haeckel forces nature to mar its own work. The
real meaning is quite clear if we bear in mind the
blunder of Oken. In this case " disturbed develop-
ment " is merely an expression of the fact that the
laws we invent are ideal forms, and not always con-
venient realities. We learn by heart that the earth
is a globe, and its orbit is an ellipse. Neither of
the two propositions is strictly accurate ; no mathe-
matical figure even has objective reality. By the
232 HAECKEL
sheer attraction of the water of the ocean to the
continents the earth has an irregularity of shape
that it is barely possible to express in words. To
call the path of the earth round the sun, con-
stantly altering as it does, and still further com-
plicated by the sun's own movement, a real ellipse
is the greatest nonsense conceivable.
In this sense every natural law is subject to dis-
turbances, though these in turn are the outcome of
natural laws. If we do not cavil over the name,
we find that the idea it stands for is of the greatest
consequence for any further use of the biogenetic
law. Unless it is borne in mind, the law, especially
in the hands of the inexpert, falls into hopeless
confusion. We read so often that the ancestral
history is identical with the embryonic develop-
ment. The one is a recapitulation of the other.
This supposed law is then applied in psychology,
aesthetics, and many other directions. If it
succeeds, there is jubilation. If it does not succeed
(as it does not in a thousand cases), the whole
blame is thrown on Haeckel. People discover that
" the biogenetic law breaks down here," and they
throw over Darwinism altogether.
The second volume of the Morphology is the
standing palladium against all this nonsense. It
marks off the real readers and followers of Haeckel
from the superficial talkers who run after him
because he is famous, and will leave him unscru-
pulously for any other celebrity of the hour.
The book must be read. Even in this second
volume an incredible amount of matter is com-
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 233
pressed. An introduction, consisting of a hundred
and sixty pages of small type, gives us an idea
of the new system. This is the first scheme of a
real " natural classification" of living things.
From this we pass to special morphology. But
this fearless sketch of the specialised genealogical
tree, according to the new ideas, puts general
morphology in its true light. We are made to feel
that it is not all mere theory. To-morrow nay,
to-day the whole practice of zoology and botany
will have to be remodelled on the new principles.
Off with the roof of the ark ! The whole museum
must be cleared out. We want new divisions, new
labels. The old controversy between the Nomina-
lists and the Eealists seemed to have come to life
once more. How students had played with the
word " affinity " as a symbol. The lemurs were
''related" to the apes, and to other groups of
mammals. The star-fishes were related to the
sea-urchins, to the encrinites. The word had,
in fact, led to a certain amount of arrangement ;
the stuffed or dried or preserved specimens in
the museum were placed side by side. Suddenly
the whole thing became a reality. The things
that were " related " to each other had really
been connected historically in earlier ages. The
lemurs were the progenitors of the apes. Behind
them were a series of other mammals. Star-fishes,
sea-urchins, and encrinites, formed a definite
branch of the great tree, and were historically
connected ; not symbolically, but in a real extinct
common ancestor.
234 HAECKEL
It was a vast work. A single man had at first
the whole kingdom in his hands, had to reject the
old lines of demarcation and create new ones.
There was a certain advantage at the time. Since
Cuvier's time an immense quantity of new dis-
coveries had accumulated for the construction of a
system of living things. Miiller, Siebold, Leuckart,
Vogt, and many others, had done a great deal
of preparatory work. All this was of great assis-
tance to the man who now came forward with
courage and a talent for organisation. Never-
theless it needed real genius, together with almost
boundless knowledge, to accomplish the task. We
must remember how reactionary (even apart from
the question of evolution) was the systematic work
of distinguished and assuredly learned zoologists
like Griebel at that time; they worked on in a
humdrum way as if the more advanced students
did not exist. How different it has all become
since Haeckel's thorough reform of classification !
We are astounded to-day at the skill with which he
drew lines in his very first sketch that were so
near to the permanent truth. I need only point
to the new scheme of the classification of the
vertebrates. A good deal of his work was, of
course, bound to be defective, because the facts
were not yet known; for instance, in fixing the
point at which the vertebrates may have evolved
from the invertebrates. It was not until a year
later that the discovery of the embryonic develop-
ment of the ascidia by Kowalewsky threw light on
this. Again, there was the solution of the problem
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 235
of the ultimate root-connection of the great
parallel animal stems. In this matter Haeckel
himself brought illumination by his gastrsea-
theory.
On the whole this systematic introduction to
the second volume would have sufficed of itself to
secure for Haeckel a prominent position in the
history of zoology and botany. He himself was
chiefly proud of the fact that it was the first
natural-philosophical system on the new lines to
meet the rigorous demands of academic science,
and indeed to revolutionise academic science. This
enhances his complete triumph in the last two
books of the volume. First man is introduced,
with absolute clearness and decisiveness, into the
system of evolved natural beings, as crown of the
animal world, but subject to the same laws as the
animal : a vertebrate, a mammal, whose nearest
relatives are the anthropoid apes. Thus at last the
" system of nature " was complete. It embodied
the unity of nature. It formed the framework of
facts for a unified natural philosophy, Monism.
The monon, the " one," embracing all things, that
included nature in itself and itself in nature,
became the last scientific definition of what people
called " God."
Thus the volume, which had begun the system
of nature with the monera, closes with a chapter
on the Monistic God " the God in nature." The
conception of God in human fashion is rejected.
Man is merely a vertebrate, a mammal, adapted in
his whole structure to our little planet. A supreme
236 HAECKEL
Being to whom we ascribe omnipresence could not
possibly be confined within the narrow limits of
this vertebrate and mammal organisation. When
we try to do so we fall into unshapely conceptions
that are wholly unworthy of the most exalted of all
words, ideas, and beings. It is in this connection
that Haeckel uses for the first time the phrase
" gaseous vertebrate," that has so often been quoted
and attacked since. He means to say that we are
driven to such debasing and senseless definitions
if we do not recognise in God the essence of the
whole system of things ; if we form our idea of him
arbitrarily on any particular property of things
within the system. We must beware as he ex-
pressly says of such confused and unworthy
comparisons.
" Our philosophy," Haeckel continues, u knows
only one God, and this Almighty God dominates
the whole of nature without exception. We see
his activity in all phenomena without exception.
The whole of the inorganic world is subject to him
just as much as the organic. If a body falls fifteen
feet in the first second in empty space, if three
atoms of oxygen unite with one atom of sulphur to
form sulphuric acid, if the angle that is formed by
the contiguous surfaces of a column of rock-crystal
is always 120 degrees, these phenomena are just as
truly the direct action of God as the flowering of
the plant, the movement of the animal, or the
thought of man. We all exist ' by the grace of
God/ the stone as well as the water, the radio-
larian as well as the pine, the gorilla as well as the
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 237
Emperor of China. No other conception of God
except this that sees his spirit and force in all
natural phenomena is worthy of his all-enfolding
greatness ; only when we trace all forces and all
movements, all the forms and properties of matter,
to God, as the sustainer of all things, do we reach
the human idea and reverence for him that really
corresponds to his infinite greatness. In him we
live, and move, and have our being. Thus does
natural philosophy become a theology. The cult
of nature passes into that service of God of which
Goethe says : ' Assuredly there is no nobler rever-
ence for God than that springs up in our heart
from conversation with nature.' God is almighty :
he is the sole sustainer and cause of all things. In
other words, God is the universal law of causality.
God is absolutely perfect ; he cannot act in any
other than a perfectly good manner; he cannot
therefore act arbitrarily or freely God is necessity.
God is the sum of all force, and therefore of all
matter. Every conception of God that separates
him from matter, and opposes to him a sum of
forces that are not of a divine nature, leads to
amphitheism (or ditheism) and on to polytheism.
In showing the unity of the whole of nature,
Monism points out that only one God exists, and
that this God reveals himself in all the phenomena
of nature. In grounding all the phenomena of
organic or inorganic nature on the universal law
of causality, and exhibiting them as the outcome of
4 efficient causes,' Monism proves that God is the
necessary cause of all things and the law itself. In
238 HAECKEL
recognising none but divine forces in nature, in
proclaiming all natural laws to be divine, Monism
rises to the greatest and most lofty conception of
which man, the most perfect of all things, is
capable, the conception of the unity of God and
nature."
The book closes with these words and a quotation
from Goethe. It had opened with a quotation
from Goethe. Goethe runs through the whole of
the two energetic volumes like an old and vener-
able anthem. The stalwart fighter not only traces
his whole Monistic philosophy to Goethe : not
only owes to him the very idea of morphology. In
front of the second and more strictly Darwinistic
volume he has a dedication " to the founders of
the theory of evolution," and between Darwin
and Lamarck we find the name of Goethe. It
was Haeckel's firm conviction that Goethe not
only believed in the unity of God and nature,
but literally in the natural evolution of the
various species of animals and plants from each
other. In this conviction, which claims Goethe
explicitly for Darwin, he has never been shaken,
although his own friends and convinced evolu-
tionists (Oscar Schmidt, for instance) have often
opposed him on the point.
Much has been written since the days of the
General Morphology both for and against this
Goethe-Darwin theory, but I cannot see that we
have got much further with it. I still find that
a candid study of some of Goethe's smaller
writings, such as the History of my Botanical
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 230
Studies, the criticism of D'Alton's Sloths
and Pachyderms (which is very important), and
several others, compels us to think that Goethe
really believed, in a strikingly Darwinian way,
in a slow transformation and evolution of animal
and plant species in virtue of purely natural
laws; and that he always laid great stress on
this idea of his as an original notion, far in
advance of the professional science of his time.
We not only have several clear passages, but
the whole point of his argument really rests on
this idea. Hence, apart altogether from the
pedantry that tries to make a cabalistic mystery
out of Goethe's works, and always reads B for A
and C for B, it does seem that there was truth
in Haeckel's first view of the matter, in spite of
all the ink that has been shed over it and the
vast amount of word-splitting exegesis. Darwin-
ism has, in a certain sense, its German side, even
apart from all that Haeckel has done for it.
This was the book, then, that the deeply
afflicted author wrung from himself as his " testa-
ment.'' It was written and printed with unprece-
dented speed. When the first copies were issued,
the author had a feeling that he had nearly " done
for himself." He could not sleep. The state
of his nerves gave great concern to his friends,
who were watching him most anxiously. With
a stolid fatalism, as if nothing mattered now, he
yielded to their pressing advice, and decided to
travel for a time. Far away on the blue Atlantic,
240 HAECKEL
at the gate to all the glories of the tropics,
there is an island, Teneriffe, that was counted
one of " the isles of the blest " in the old Koman
days. A huge volcano rises from it, and on its
flanks we find all the zones of the geography of
plants, as in a model collection. Humboldt has
given us a splendid description of it, as the first
station of his voyage to the tropics. " The man
who has some feeling for the beauty of Nature,"
he says, " will find a more powerful restorative
than climate on this lovely island. No place in
the world seems to me better calculated to banish
sorrow and restore peace to an embittered soul."
Haeckel went there.
It was not an expensive journey, but it came as
a fresh greeting from Nature. It was a new ocean
after the long studies on the Mediterranean.
What might it not afford in the way of medusae
and other zoological prizes when the general
beauty of the landscape, that had enchanted
Humboldt, had been fully enjoyed. With a
mingling of his overflowing passion for Nature, and
the gloomy fatalism that told him this would be
his " last voyage " after his " last book," he asked
permission to leave Jena in the autumn of 1866,
when the printing of the Morphology was com-
pleted, and set out. It was no more to be his
last voyage than the Morphology to be his last
testament. Although still subdued with resigna-
tion in his inner life, he came home in the spring
of 1867 with a new elasticity of body and mind,
restored by the influence of the palms and bananas
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 241
and spurge, and braced for the great struggle of his
life that was now to begin in earnest.
The voyage had really two aims. To see the
volcano above a palm-clad coast, with the Atlantic
Ocean bringing its medusae; and to work for
Darwin.
A personal connection between the two had
already been formed as a matter of course.
Darwin, almost confined for years to his isolated
home at Down owing to his constant ill-health,
had received a copy of the Badiolaria, and the
correspondence had begun. The work had as yet
met with little encouragement from the ranks
of exact scientists. It cannot have been a matter
of indifference to Darwin personally that so dis-
tinguished a work, a real model of professional
research, had come over to him. Proofs of the
Morphology were sent over to Down before the
book was ready for publication. Darwin read
G-erman with difficulty, but in this case he was
stimulated to make an unusual effort. At last
Haeckel himself made his appearance at the
master's home. It seemed as though he had to
visit him in person to receive his blessing. It
was, at all events, a happy moment in the history
of Darwinism when the two men first met whose
names will be inseparable in literature.
This was in October, 1866 ; Darwin had sent his
carriage to bring Haeckel from the station. A
sunny autumn morning smiled on the homely and
beautiful English landscape with its bright woods
and golden broom and red erica and evergreen oaks.
16
242 HAECKEL
Haeckel has described their first meeting. " When
the carriage drew up before Darwin's house, with
its ivy and its shadowy elms, the great scientist
stepped out of the shade of the creeper-covered
porch to meet me. He had a tall and venerable
appearance, with the broad shoulders of an Atlas
that bore a world of thought : a Jove-like forehead,
as we see in Goethe, with a lofty and broad vault,
deeply furrowed by the plough of intellectual
work. The tender and friendly eyes were over-
shadowed by the great roof of the prominent
brows. The gentle mouth was framed in a long,
silvery white beard. The noble expression of the
whole face, the easy and soft voice, the slow and
careful pronunciation, the natural and simple
tenor of his conversation, took my heart by storm
in the first hour that we talked together, just as
his great work had taken my intelligence by storm
at the first reading. I seemed to have before me
a venerable sage of ancient Greece, a Socrates or
an Aristotle."
They were delighted to meet each other, for
they were like natures, in their best qualities.
Darwin had more passion in him than he ever
expressed, and behind all Haeckel's impetuosity
there was the naive and yielding temper of the
child. He poured out his anger against the
stubborn and bewigged professors who still held
out against the luminous truth of the theory of
evolution. Darwin put his hand on his shoulder,
smiled, and said they were rather to be pitied
than blamed, and that they could not keep back
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 243
permanently the stream of truth. At heart,
however, he was delighted with his fiery pupil.
They were to fight their battle shoulder to
shoulder for seventeen years. During all those
years there was never the slightest disturbance
of their friendship. Darwin knew well what an
auxiliary he had in Haeckel. It is true that he
wrote him a wonderful letter occasionally, in
which he used the right of a senior to warn
Haeckel not to deal so violently with his oppo-
nents. Violence only had the effect of making
onlookers side with the party you attacked. We
must be careful not to be too hasty in setting
things up as positive truths, as we see every day
people starting from the same premises and coming
to opposite conclusions. But he was generally at
one with Haeckel, and had the good spirit to
acknowledge it openly. When Haeckel' s History
of Creation raised up the most extreme parties,
and started the cry that a distinction must be
drawn at once between Darwin's real scientific
ideas and HaeckeFs desperate excursions into
natural philosophy, Darwin said, in the Descent
of Man, which he had begun much earlier, but
did not publish for some time, that he would
never have written his book if he had then known
Haeckel's History of Creation. Haeckel had
anticipated so much that he wished to say.
And when Virchow attacked Haeckel in 1877,
Darwin spoke very severely of the opponents who
would make the eternal freedom to teach the
truth dependent on the accidental conditions of
244 HAECKEL
a modern State. Haeckel visited him twice at
Down. On February 12, 1882, he sent Darwin
his congratulations on his seventy-third birthday
from the summit of Adam's Peak in Ceylon.
This was his last greeting. Darwin died two
months afterwards. There was a touch of
romance in this last communication of the two
great warriors. On the summit of the mountain,
almost as sharp as a needle, and 2,500 yards above
the Indian Ocean, a tiny temple of Buddha hangs
like a stork's nest suspended by chains. Buddha
is believed to have left his footprints on the rocks
here. The Mohammedan tradition, however, says
it was done by Adam as he stood on one foot and
bemoaned the loss of Paradise. In front of this
holy trace, a depression in the rock about a foot
long, Haeckel made a speech to his travelling
companions, and they broke the neck of a bottle
of Rhine wine to Darwin's health. It is no little
stretch of humanity's pilgrimage, from Adam to
Buddha and on to Darwin.
In October, 1866, Haeckel had a companion in
a teacher from Bonn, Eichard GreeS (afterwards
professor of zoology at Marburg). They took ship
from London to Lisbon, where they were long
detained for quarantine, though the annoyance
was somewhat relieved by the discovery of an
interesting medusa in the brackish water of the
Tagus. They then went to Madeira and Tenerife,
not right into the tropics, but where they might
get a breath of it, as it were. Two of Haeckel's
pupils, who both became well known afterwards,
ERNST HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT MIKLUCHO-MACLAY
AT LANZAROTE, IN THE CANARIES, 1867.
To face p. 244.
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 245
Miklucho-Maclay and Fol, were with them. Greeff
has given a full account of the journey in a whole
volume (published at Bonn, 1868), and Haeckel
has written of it in two articles, one of which (in
the fifth volume of the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft
fur Erdfamde, Berlin, 1870) is a perfect master-
piece of narrative and description of scenery.
After a long search they chose as the best
station for studying marine animals, especially
the medusae, the little island of Lanzarote,
instead of one of the chief islands. Here they
fished and drew, in the manner taught by
Johannes Miiller, for three months, from Decem-
ber, 1866, to February, 1867. It is not exactly
an ideal place. " Imagine yourself dumped down
on the moor ! " Haeckel said afterwards in his
description of it. A piece of arid land that looked
like a strip of the Sahara in the middle of the
ocean. There is hardly any water, and the
vegetation is correspondingly meagre. Across
the middle of the island stretches a chain of
volcanic craters, and old lava-fields run down
from them as far as the coast. Everything of
zoological interest in the place was to be found
in the sea. There they found abundance. As in
Messina, certain local currents drove the rich
animal plancton together until there were literally
rivers or streets of tiny animals. One had only
to dip in one's nets and glasses, and bring up
whole shoals with every drop of water.
Haeckel had come chiefly to study the medusae.
But this led him on much further to a great
246 HAECKEL
zoological problem. In his General Morphology
he had expounded his brilliant ideas on the subject
of individuality, and now he encountered in the
flesh one of the greatest marvels of animal
individuality. He had shown how the higher
individual is always made up of a community,
a kind of state, of lower individuals. In the
simplest instance there are the cells. Each of
them is an individual. Millions of these indi-
viduals, banded together with division of labour
for great collective operations, make up the human
frame, and therefore the human " individual."
In the same way others form a beetle, a snail, or
a single medusa. Sometimes, however, these
higher individuals enter in turn into social
combinations to form still higher communities.
Human beings form social commonwealths, with
division of labour among the individuals. Bees
and ants form their communities in the same
way. But in the latter cases the texture of the
community seems to be much looser than in the
preceding one. It is not so easy for the imagina-
tion to grasp a human commonwealth or a colony
of bees as a real " over-individual." It is, there-
fore, extremely instructive to find that at least
one animal community of this kind is of so firm
a texture that even on the most superficial
examination it is recognised at once as an
individual. This is found in one of the groups
of the medusae, the siphonophores, or social
medusae.
A number of single medusae, each of which
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 247
corresponds to what we regard as the individual
man, combine and form a new body, a social
individual. As citizens of this new state they
have introduced the most rigid division of labour.
One medusa does nothing but eat, and it thus
provides nourishment for the rest, as they are all
joined in one body. Another accomplishes the
swimming movement ; another has been converted
entirely into a reproductive organ. In a word,
the whole has become a " unity " once more,
equipped with its various organs like any large
body. Sometimes thousands of separate medusae
enter into the structure of one of these wonders
of the deep. And as each of the medusae is
generally a very pretty, flower-like creature, the
social groups with their charming colours look
like floating garlands of flowers made of trans-
parent and tinted crystal. Their beauty would
soon fix Haeckel's attention, but their bearing on
his theory of individuality would give them an
even greater value. For several years he had
searched most attentively in the animal world for
these " over-individuals " of the highest class. In
the morphology he had had to be content with
an old illustration of something of the kind, the
star-fish. It was supposed to be a combination
of vermalians. In this case the hypothesis has
broken down, though there was a good deal to be
said for it at first, and it was abandoned by him
afterwards. But now, when he saw enormous
numbers of siphonophores in the animal streams
at Lanzarote, he entered upon a decisive study of
248 HAECKEL
the meaning of these real " social animals." A
social medusa has so great an appearance of unity
that those who discovered it first did not believe
it was a community, but a very complicated
individual medusa. Vogt (1847) and Leuckart
(1851) had denied this, and declared it to be a
social group. But the controversy was still going
on, as there was much difference of opinion as to
the meaning of "social" and "state." Haeckel
now succeeded at Lanzarote in tracing for the first
time the development of one of these siphono-
phores from the ovum. He was able to show that
from the ovum only a single simple medusa is
developed. This, then, becomes the parent of the
community ; it produces the rest of the members,
not by a new sexual generation, but by budding
out from itself, until the whole garland of con-
nected individuals is ready to constitute the new
over-individual, or the community. These lumi-
nous investigations were published three years
afterwards (1869) in a work that was crowned by
the Utrecht Society of Art and Science (The
Embryology of the Siphonophorce, with fourteen
plates, published at Utrecht). But Haeckel
returned time after time in later years to this
group of animals with such great philosophic and
zoological interest. When he had put before him
in the eighties the whole of the siphonophores
brought home by the splendid Challenger expedi-
tion, he combined the material with the results of
his own studies in a fine work, which was included
(in English) in the publications of the Challenger
A SlPHONOPHORE
(Disconalia gastroblasta.)
Tofacep 248.
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 249
series at London, as the 28th volume of the
Zoology of the Challenger, 1888. The voluminous
work is illustrated with fifty masterly plates, some
of them coloured, by Haeckel himself. The most
important part of the text was also published in
German at Jena, with the title, System of the
Siphonophorce. There is a good popular account
of the siphonophore question in his lecture on
" The Division of Labour in Nature and in
Human Life " (1869). A few of these beautiful
forms are also given on coloured plates in his
illustrated work, Art-forms in Nature. Every
thoughtful man ought, whatever his position is
as regards Haeckel's ideas, to glance at this
material that he has so vigorously and clearly
presented.
While he was conducting this research into
the embryonic development of the siphonophores,
Haeckel made certain experiments on phenomena
that have lately been made the subject of a special
" experimental mechanical embryology " by some
of his pupils, particularly Professor Roux, of Halle.
He cut up siphonophore ova into several pieces at
the commencement of their development, and saw
an incomplete social medusa develop from each
fragment.
Thus the journey, like the earlier one to
Messina, brought the indefatigable student Jinto
touch once more with a " philosophical animal."
This alone would have made it well worth the
trouble. How many more of the kind the future
might still have in reserve for him ! In the quiet
250 HAECKEL
months at Puerto del Arrecise, on Lanzarote, he
was gradually restored to his spiritual balance.
Nature had taken much from him, but she offered
him an inexhaustible return. His elasticity and
vigour of frame had been restored before he left
Teneriffe. In a twenty-two hours' tour, only
interrupted by two hours' sleep, he had climbed
to the highest summit of the Peak, in such an
unfavourable season (in the November snow) that
the native guides would not go any further in the
end; all those who were with him except one
stopped short a little way from the top. The
short rest at the summit (4,128 yards above the
sea-level, on the icy edge of the crater) was
greatly enjoyed by him. He could see over a
distance of 5,700 square miles, as much as one-
fourth of the whole of Spain. " The extraordinary
range and height of the horizon gives one a vague
idea of the infinity of space. The deep unbroken
silence and the consciousness that we have left
all animal and vegetal life far behind, produce a
profound feeling of solitude. One feels oneself,
with a certain pride, master of the situation that
has been secured with so much trouble and risk.
But the next moment one feels what we really are
momentary waves in the infinite ocean of life,
transitory combinations of a comparatively small
number of organic cells, which, in the last resort,
owe their origin and significance to the peculiar
chemical properties of carbon. How small and
mean at such moments do we find the little play
of human passions that unfolds itself far below in
THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 251
the haunts of civilisation ! How great and exalted
in comparison does free Nature seem, as it unrolls
before us, in one vast picture, the whole majesty
and splendour of its creative power ! " Thus he
himself describes the moment. Something of that
feeling of exalted solitude entered into his life.
He stood firm and undazed come what might.
CHAPTEE VII
GROWTH OF IDEAS
AT Easter, 1867, Haeckel returned to Jena
through Morocco, Madrid, and Paris. He
spent a few of the pleasant spring weeks at the
Strait of Gibraltar and in the South of Spain. In
the fine bay of Algeciras (opposite to Gibraltar on
the west) the current of the Strait brought swarms
of interesting medusae, siphonophores, and other
" plancton-animals " into his net. In his solitary
walks through the mountain forests of Andalusia,
in the incomparable Moorish palaces and the
cathedrals of Seville and Cordova, Granada and
the Alhambra, he gazed on that wealth of Spain
in treasures of Nature and Art which had excited
his boyish imagination in the vivid pictures of
Washington Irving.
With his return home a crisis occurred in his
career, from our biographical point of view, such
as we find at one point or other in the lives of
all great men. Up to the present the course of
his life has advanced steadily onward, so that the
simple chronological order afforded the most
GROWTH OF IDEAS 253
natural thread for our narrative. With this crisis
his activity broadens out more. His ideas, almost
all of which are presented in the General Morph-
ology, form a great and continuous stem, which
throws out a large or a small flower on one side or
other, according to the stimulus received. His life
crystallises about Jena ; however many journeys
he makes, he always feels that he will return to his
centre at Jena. Nothing in his later career ever
shook him from this ideal and personal base.
In the summer after his return to Jena, 1867,
he married Agnes Huschke, daughter of the dis-
tinguished Jena anatomist. He shares the
happiness of this second marriage down to the
present day. Of their three children, the son is
now a gifted artist at Munich ; the elder daughter
is the wife of Professor Hans Meyer, proprietor of
the Leipsic Bibliographical Institute, who is par-
ticularly known in science by his ascent of the
Kilimandschars ; the younger daughter is still at
home with her parents.
He never leaves the University of Jena and it
never abandons him. It is a kind of spiritual
marriage. In 1865, when the sky was still free
from clouds, he was invited to take a position at
Wiirtzburg, his old school-place. He declined the
invitation, and was then appointed ordinary pro-
fessor at Jena. Then the evil days came. The
conclusions of his Morphology were popularised by
himself, and went out far and wide amongst the
masses. People opened their eyes to find that this
audacious scientist was making " war upon God "
254 HAECKEL
out of his zoology. At length the difficult question
arises whether a mind of that type can be retained
in the honourable position of official professor.
The Philistines are in arms. The quiet, stubborn
group, that has vegetated unchanged, like a de-
moralised parasitic animal, from Abdern to Schilda,
through thousands of years of the free development
of the mind, boycots the professor and his family
for a time. The Philistines appeal from their
safe corner to the authorities to intervene. Once,
towards the close of the sixties, the situation
threatened to become really critical. The head of
the governing body of the university at the time
was Seebeck, a distinguished man who by no
means shared Haeckel's views, but had a just
feeling of Haeckel's honourableness and mental
power. In the middle of the struggle Haeckel
approaches him one day, and says that he is pre-
pared to resign his position, a sacrifice to his
ideas. Seebeck replied, "My dear Haeckel, you
are still young, and you will come yet to have more
mature views of life. After all, you will do less
harm here than elsewhere, so you had better stop
here." At Jena they still tell a similar story that
happened on another occasion. A stern theologian
' presented himself in person at the chateau of Karl
Alexander, Grand Duke of Weimar, and begged
him to put an end to this scandal of the professor-
ship of Haeckel, the arch-heretic. The Grand
Duke, educated in the Weimar tradition of Goethe,
asked, "Do you think he really believes these
things that he publishes?" " Most certainly he
GROWTH OF IDEAS 255
does," was the prompt reply. "Very good/' said
the Grand Duke, "then the man simply does the
same as you do."
Haeckel remained a professor at Jena; and
when the current subsided a little, he was not
insensible of their liberality. He remained faithful
to Jena, though even Vienna, amongst other places,
offered him a position (1871). Under his guidance
"zoological" Jena flourished like a poor orphan
that has suddenly been enriched. At one stroke
the university was lifted to the position of an
intellectual metropolis for the whole of the young
scientific generation of the last quarter of the
century. The best of the younger men that fill
the biological positions in Germany to-day (and
many others) were educated under Haeckel. Many
of these pupils became opponents of his eventually,
but they all went through his system. He had a
further satisfaction. He not only attracted the
young men to Jena, but he conjured up as if by
magic the financial resources for improving the
external advantages of the place for teaching and
working. His style of " zoology," which was at
the same time "natural philosophy," brought
people to his assistance who would never have
been won by a narrowly technical zoologist, no
matter how learned he was. Twice men were
induced " for his sake " that is to say, induced
by the magnetic force of his charming personality
to leave large legacies to be spent on the university
under his direction; once it was the Countess
Bose, another time Paul von Bitter of Basle.
256 HAECKEL
Bitter alone gave sufficient to found two pro-
fessorships at Jena for the express purpose of
teaching the science of phylogeny that Haeckel
had created.
All through the period of his long stay at Jena
that followed we trace a series of continual holiday
journeys. In these journeys he used to collect
the best material for his professional research,
following the method he had learned from Miiller
at Heligoland, and had practised at Messina and
Lanzarote. At the same time these travels were,
like the earlier ones, the bath of eternal youth and
health for " the other soul in his breast " ; the
artist, the lusty wanderer, I might almost say the
inveterate Bohemian in him, was then allowed to
have his spell of song and gaiety. In Jena he
took deeper and deeper root as time went on.
There was something in him in this respect of a
Persephone impulse, an alternation of winter and
summer in his life. When the days of hard and
wearing work were past, he would have to rush
away into the free air, down to the blue sea, to far
and happy Nature. " Here I am a man dare be a
man." The duty of the zoologist of Miiller 's
school to go down to the sea to work came to his
rich temperament, which included so much more
than mere "professional reasons," with a splendid
sense of Persephone-life : half his time in the cold
North studying animal skeletons and dead bones
by the burning lamp, the other half in the glare of
the sun of reality, in living nature at its best. I
will only quote summarily a few dates of these
GROWTH OF IDEAS 257
travels. In 1869 he spent the autumn vacation
in Scandinavia. In 1871 he was in the island of
Lesina in Dalmatia, where he, the arch-heretic,
lived in a monastery with a jolly abbot. From
beautiful Ragusa he made an interesting excursion
to Cattaro and Montenegro. In 1873 he went to
Egypt and Asia Minor, visiting Athens, Con-
stantinople, Brussa, and the Black Sea. The
culmination of this journey was a visit to the
splendid coral banks of Tur, in the Red Sea. The
Khedive, Ismail Pacha, put a Government steamer
at his disposal for the journey. The excursion has
been superbly described by Haeckel himself in the
little volume, The Corals of Arabia (1876). The
same volume contains the first specimens of his
landscapes in water-colour. He spent the spring
of 1875 in Corsica and Sardinia. On that occasion
Oscar Hertwig discovered, in his presence, the
process of fertilisation in the sea-urchin; his
discoveries will long remain a turning-point in
the history of our knowledge of sexual generation
(one of the deepest mysteries in nature). In the
autumn of 1876 he was at work on the coast of
Great Britain, and reached as far as Ireland. In
the spring of 1877 he was at Ithaca and Corfu ;
in the autumn we find him on the Riviera. In
1878 he went first to Fiume and Pola on the
Adriatic, and afterwards on an Atlantic excursion
to Brittany, Normandy, and Jersey. In the
autumn of 1879 he was in Holland and Scotland.
In 1881 he made the second longest journey of
his life. He secured permission to absent himself
17
258 HAECKEL
from the university for six months, and went to
Ceylon. He left Jena on the 8th of October, and
did not return until April 21, 1882. The traveller
and aesthete in him revelled in this first plunge
into the tropics. How he was taken to the
enchanted land of India in the Lloyd steamer
Helios, a pretty reminiscence of the " heliozoa "
(sun-plants), a name he had himself invented ; how
he greeted his beloved medusae in their beautiful
tropical forms of the Indian Ocean ; how he lived
in the execrable but thoroughly tropical and in-
teresting Whist-Bungalow at Colombo, where
mysticism and an unholy joy in card-playing
occupied him until philosophic zoology came to
crown and redeem everything ; how he set up his
zoological laboratory far from the world at the
Cingalese village of Belligemma (which he inter-
preted bella gemma, the " pretty jewel"), and
fished with his Muller net for radiolaria, medusae,
and siphonophorae, for six whole weeks, to the
intense bewilderment of the naked children of the
palms ; how he at last penetrated into the wildest
virgin forests of Ceylon, where one heard the heavy
tread of the elephant and the roar of the panther
all this he has described in his Visit to Ceylon,
the freshest expression of his temperament, which
belongs utterly to the free, artistic half of his life,
when Persephone has her summer days in the
land of flowers.
He himself regarded this journey, happy and
favoured to the very last minute, as a crown and
conclusion of his travels that could never be sur-
GROWTH OF IDEAS 259
passed. But many a long hour was to be spent in
travel after that, and he was to make one journey
that left Ceylon far behind him in the Indian
Ocean. In the spring of 1887 he made a pilgrim-
age to the " Holy Land," Jerusalem and the Dead
Sea, Damascus and Lebanon. On this journey he
spent a delightful month on the island of Ehodos.
In 1889 he had a pleasant time on the beautiful
island of Elba. In 1890 he visited Algiers, where
his innocent sketches and his anatomical knife
brought suspicion on him ; they arrested him and
threatened to shoot him as a spy. He has described
the incident in his genial way in his Algerian
Beminiscences which is, unfortunately, lost in a
back number of some magazine or other, like so
many of the sketches of his travels. In 1897 he
travelled over the whole of Eussia, from Finland
to the Caucasus, and visited Tiflis, Colchis, and
the Crimea. In the autumn of 1892 he accompanied
Sir John Murray, of the Challenger expedition,
on a small deep-sea investigation on the coast of
Scotland. In the spring of 1893 and 1897 he was
at work once more in his beloved Messina, where
he was now honoured as a world-famous guest.
In the autumn of 1899 he climbed the Sabine and
Corsican hills. As the second decade after his
first journey to the tropics came to an end, he
seemed to regard all he had done so far as a small
payment on account. In his sixty-sixth year he
felt the " home-sickness " for the tropics once more
with such intensity that he quickly made up his
mind to go as far as the equator. He left Jena on
260 HAECKEL
August 21, 1900, and (after a brief visit to the
exhibition at Paris) took ship at Genoa, on
September 4th, for Singapore. His beloved Italy
had provided part of the cost of the journey. In
the previous year the Royal Academy of Science at
Turin had awarded him the Bressa-prize (consisting
of 10,000 lire) on account of his Systematic
Phylogeny. Once more the tropics revived the
great impression made on him in his earlier visit.
This time he spent only a few hours in Ceylon,
and sailed further south. He landed at Singapore
on September 27th, and sixteen days afterwards
went on to Java, and thus crossed the equator at
last. He enjoyed to the full the charms of the
landscape with its volcanoes and virgin forests,
during his stay with Treub at Buitenzorg, at
Tjibodas, and during his long journey across the
greater part of the island. At Tjibodas he cele-
brated the close of the nineteenth century [German
calculation] by painting a fine water-colour of the
smoke-canopy over the summit of the volcano
Gedeh, touched and gilded by the east rays of the
sun on the last day of 1900. On January 23, 1901,
he went from Batavia to Sumatra, crossed the
Sunda Strait in sight of the famous volcanic ruins
of Krakatoa, and spent six weeks in Padang oh
the south-west coast of Sumatra. This delay was
largely involuntary, and due to an injury to his knee,
caused by stumbling over a rail during a visit to
an engineering establishment; but the time was
by no means lost in the middle of such glories.
On March 31st he landed in Europe (at Naples)
GROWTH OF IDEAS 261
once more, after a safe voyage. The notes he made
during his journey yielded another charming work,
Letters from the East Indies and Malaysia (1901).
His spirit of enterprise is inexhaustible, and still
continues.
Within this frame of his career we have now
to study a growth of ideas and a continuance of
research that tell of vigour, consistency, and
success in every line. It unfolds logically like a
great work of art.
The General Morphology stands at the parting
of two ways. It afforded a programme of an
infinite amount of fresh technical research the
elaboration of his studies in detail, of promor-
phology, of his theory of individuality, and of the
phylogenetic system of living things ; and the
strengthening of the laws of evolution, especially
the great biogenetic law. On the other hand, there
was the purely philosophic work to be done : the
gathering together of the general threads that
ran through his work, and the building of a new
philosophy of life, based on a new story of creation,
from the atom to the moneron, from the moneron
to man, and the whole to be comprised and
contained in God. In a word, he might proceed
in either of two ways from the Morphology: he
might construct academic zoology afresh, or he
might write a work on the new God.
When he came home from Lanzarote, the two
ways seemed to coincide in front of him ; his work
had, indeed, opened them out as one. But external
262 HAECKEL
circumstances intervened. As things are, it was
only his academic colleagues that had any right to
the new biology. A new book on God and creation
would go out to " the publicans and sinners. "
Interest must be lit up amongst the people at large,
where there was as yet only the faintest spark. It
appeared, moreover, that most of his academic
colleagues in 1867 had no wish to enter on the new
path he had opened out. A new generation would
have to grow up first. The Morphology ', from
which Haeckel on his travels had expected at least
a revolution, met at first with an icy silence. There
was hardly any discussion of it, and no excitement
whatever. Haeckel quickly made up his mind.
He must turn in the other direction. Gegenbaur
consoles him. He has given too much twenty
dishes instead of one. He must serve up the best
part of the work on one dish, and it will be taken.
Haeckel agrees with him to some extent, but his
heavy technical artillery cannot be simplified so
easily as that. The only possible thing to do is to
give an extract of it, which will make the broad
lines of the system clear. But as soon as that is
done, he sees that the extract is still only the
general philosophical part of it, and will not appeal
to the general public.
It was such reflections as these that led to the
writing of his History of Creation, a popular
work.*
The chapters of this work were first delivered
* Translated into English with the above title. Literally, the
title is : The Story of Natural Creation.
GROWTH OF IDEAS 263
orally to students, in the form of lectures, and
formed a kind of introduction to morphology. The
lectures, retaining their lighter form, were then
combined to make the book. It was published in
1868, a small volume in a very primitive garb.
The success of the work was unprecedented.
Zoology and botany were treated philosophically
in the Morphology. That did not suit the pro-
fessional scientists, who (as I said) crossed them-
selves when they saw " natural philosophy." In
the History of Creation the great problems of
philosophy are dealt with successively on Dar-
winian lines, from the zoological and botanical
point of view. It was like the sinking of a deep
well amongst general thoughtful readers. People
felt at last what a power science had become. The
old riddles of life were studied in a new light with
the aid of this book. There was no predecessor in
this field. Haeckel was absolutely the first to
appeal to the general reader in this way. It is
true that what he gave them was, strictly speaking,
only an extract from his own Morphology, espe-
cially the second volume. But as he now arranged
his matter chronologically, he converted his outline
of a world-system into a " world-history " a real
" history of natural creation." In the " Pictures
of Nature" in the first volume of his Cosmos
Humboldt had tried to bring the natural world
before his readers as a great panorama, to be taken
in at one glance. But he strictly confined his
study of nature to the things that actually exist ;
how they came to exist was not, he intimated,
264 HAECKEL
a subject of scientific inquiry. Haeckel proceeds
to this further task. His panorama of nature does
not stand out rigidly before us ; it develops, under
the eyes of the observer, from the formless? nebula
to the intelligent human being. Even on the
surface this was seen to be a prodigious advance.
Very plain, but very attractive, it makes its way
by the force of its convincing dialectic, and places
no reliance on the fireworks of rhetoric. The
subtle power of it lies in the arrangement of the
facts, which suddenly assume the form of a logical
chain instead of being a shapeless chaos. Even if
all the main ideas of the work were false, we should
be compelled to regard it as one of the cleverest
works that was ever written, from the dialectical
point of view. But the essence of this cleverness
is the way in which the grouping of the facts is
made to yield the philosophic evolution, which is
the thoughtful basis of the work. As the world
proceeds in its natural development from the
nebular cosmic raw-material until it culminates in
the ape and man, the reader finds himself at the
same time advancing along a series of general
philosophic conclusions with regard to God, the
world, and man. If at the end he has retained the
whole series of what are to him more or less new
scientific details, he is bound to find himself caught
in a strong net of philosophic conclusions.
In view of all this we can easily understand the
different reception that the book met with from
friend and foe. People who had already assented to
the main issues of the work on general grounds of
GROWTH OF IDEAS 265
probability, were delighted to find these issues
decisively established by the plain facts of science.
On the other hand, those who would have none of
Haeckel's philosophy now felt compelled, in view
of this dreadful work, to call these alleged facts of
science themselves into question. In face of this
hostility it was some disadvantage that the History
of Creation contained a vast amount of technical
material (such as the genealogical trees, the Dar-
winian laws, the explanation of the facts of embry-
ology, &c.) that could only be presented summarily
in it, while the proper technical description and
justification of them was buried in the thick
volumes of the Morphology. Haeckel said, over
and over again, that a certain thing had been so
fully established by him scientifically in the other
work that he was now at liberty to take it as a
fact ; and he accordingly built it up as such with-
out prejudice into the compact structure of the
popular work. Readers who wanted to go further
into the discussion of these facts had to look up the
relevant passages in the larger book. But the
great bulk of his opponents amongst whom we
must count even many professional scientists had
never read the two volumes of the Morphology.
They merely took the brief statement in the History
of CreatioUj which was really little more than a
reference, and made a violent attack on the " fact "
it was said to convey.
This led to a great deal of confusion. As in this
case a controversy over some petty zoological
detail was always a " struggle about God," and so
266 HAECKEL
agitated the opponent down to the most secret folds
of his philosophy, the usual consequences did not
fail to put in an appearance. Haeckel was branded
and calumniated personally. There has never
been any apostle in the world that some sect or
other has not decried as a rogue and evil-doer,
simply because he was an apostle. Wherever
Haeckel has made use of any material that did
not seem to be absolutely sound in every respect,
he was not simply accused of making a mistake,
not even of ignorance, but the whole thing has
been put down at once to dishonesty and the
worst type of bad faith.
One should bear in mind how very generally
pioneer work of this kind is liable to err. Further,
in the History of Creation there is the danger
involved in the popular presentation of the results
of scientific research. Any man who has written
popular works, or delivered lectures to the general
public, knows what this means. There is little
common measure between them. The truths of
science are in a state of constant flux ; it is of their
essence to be so. To fish out a piece from this
stream, fix it, and magnify it for the public with a
broad beam of light, really amounts in principle to
an alteration of it ; it is putting a certain pressure
on things, and giving them an arbitrary shape.
The work of popularising truths is so holy a thing
in its aim that this risk has to be run. We must
take things as they are. We have two alternatives:
either not to popularise at all, or to take the
apparatus with all its defects. We can diminish
GROWTH OF IDEAS 267
these according to our skill ; but there is a sub-
jective limit to this skill in all of us.
The first edition of the History of Creation
Haeckel's first attempt at popularising had a good
deal of inequality in this respect. To begin with,
the book had the air of an extempore deliverance.
Its success was very largely due to its being cast in
this form. But there was a good deal that could
be improved here and there, and was improved in
the later editions of the work. In the tenth
edition, as we now have it, it is a splendid work in
regard to the illustrations, for instance. But the
first edition was merely provided with a few very
crude woodcuts in outline. Some of them were
very clumsy. In comparing different embryological
objects the same blocks were used sometimes,
and this would give rise to misunderstanding in
the mind of the reader. For instance, there was
question of demonstrating that certain objects,
such as the human ovum and the ovum of some
of the related higher mammals, were just the same
in their external outlines. This fact is quite correct
and established to-day. If I draw the outline, and
write underneath it that as a type it is applicable
to all known ova of the higher mammals, including
man, there is no possibility of misunderstanding.
But if I print the same illustration three times
with the suggestion that they are three different
mammal-ova, the general reader is easily apt to
think, not only that they are identical in the
general scheme of this outline, but also in internal
structure. He imagines that the ova of man and
268 HAECKEL
the ape are just the same even in their microscopic
and chemical features. This leads to a contra-
diction between the illustration and what Haeckel
expressly says in the text. We read that there is
indeed an external resemblance in shape between
these ova, but that there is bound to be a great
difference in internal structure, since an ape is
developed from the one and a human being
developed from the other. It would have been
better^ if the general reader, who is not familiar
with these outline pictures, had been more em-
phatically informed in the text below the illustration
that even the outline is to be taken as a general
and ideal scheme. In this sense we must certainly
admit that the illustration was bad, since it would
lead to a misunderstanding of the clear words of
the text. But what are we to say when the oppo-
nents of Haeckel's views viciously raise the cry of
" bad faith " on the ground of a few little slips
like this, and suggest that he deliberately tried to
mislead his readers with false illustrations?
Amongst the general public, in so far as it was
hostile to Haeckel, the charge blossomed out into
the most curious forms. Some declared that the
whole story of a resemblance between man's ovum
and embryo and those of other animals was an
invention of Professor Haeckers ; others we even
read it now and again in our own time went so
far as to say that the human ovum and embryonic
forms only existed in Haeckel's imagination. All
these wild charges are of no avail. The human
ovum, which corresponds entirely in its general
GROWTH OF IDEAS 269
scheme to that of the other higher mammals, was
not discovered in 1868 by the wicked Haeckel, but
in 1827 by the great master of embryological
research, Carl Ernst von Baer. The considerable
external resemblance, at certain stages of develop-
ment, between the embryos of reptiles, birds, and
mammals, including man, was decisively established
by the same great scientist. These really remark-
able stages in the development of the human
embryo, during which, in accordance with the
biogenetic law, it shows clear traces of the gill-slits
of its fish-ancestors, and has a corresponding fin-
like structure of the four limbs and a very con-
siderable tail, can be seen by the general reader at
any time in the illustrated works of His, Ecker, and
Kolliker (Haeckel's chief opponents) or in any
illustrated manual of embryology, and their full
force as evolutionary evidence can be appreciated.
Any man that constructs his philosophy in such a
way that, in his conviction, it stands or falls with
the existence of these embryonic phenomena, is in
a very delicate position, apart altogether from
Haeckel. His philosophy will collapse, even if the
History of Creation had never been written.
These curious discussions did not seriously inter-
fere with the success of the book. In thousands
and thousands of minds, in 1868, this little work
proved the grain of seed that led on in time to
serious thought. From that time onward Haeckel
knew that he had not only scientific colleagues and
academic pupils, but a crowd of followers. When
he made an excursion into the northern part of the
270 HAECKEL
Sahara, as far as the first oasis, twenty-two years
afterwards, he met an artist there. They talked
philosophy, and the man, not knowing Haeckel,
naively recommended him to study the History of
Creation as likely to give him most help. The
little incident shows us something of the great
pioneer work done by the volume, something of its
spiritual circumnavigation of the globe.
Thus the spiritual nucleus of the General
Morphology is introduced, with great ability, to a
much wider circle than Haeckel had dreamed of
when he gave the Morphology to his colleagues.
But the agitation gradually spread into academic
circles. On the whole the Darwinian ideas pressed
in everywhere by their own irresistible weight.
Haeckel's more particular concern, however, was
to secure the recognition of one single point in the
larger group of ideas the great biogenetic law.
This was for many years the pivot on which almost
all the discussions with him and about him turned.
He himself did not at first conceive his law as
a matter of controversy, but as a method that
must be brought into a position of practical utility.
An opportunity to do this arose immediately.
While he was at Lanzarote he began to take an
interest in a second group of lowly animals besides
the siphonophores, namely the sponges. When
the general reader hears the word "sponge" he
must modify his ordinary ideas a little. In the
present instance he must not think of the plants,
belonging to the fungi-group, such as the morel
GROWTH OF IDEAS 271
and cognate forms, that are often called " sponges "
in common parlance. He must think rather
of the sponge he uses in his bath. The bath-
sponge is a structure made up of very tough,
elastic, horny fibres. This structure is originally
the skeleton, as it were, of certain animals that
are known as " sponge-animals " or, briefly,
sponges ; they have nothing to do with the spongy
mushrooms I spoke of. At the same time these
socially-living sponges are such curious creatures
that it was disputed for a long time whether they
were real animals or not. There was a second
controversy in regard to them as to where the
" individual " began what was a single animal,
and what a co-operative colony of animals. The
latter point alone would have been enough to
direct Haeckel's attention to this group after he
had, in the case of the siphonophores, gone so
deeply into the mystery of combined individuals,
forming a new " state-individual." His own
opinion eventually was that as a matter of fact in
the majority of cases the whole sponge is a stock
or colony of separate sponge individuals closely
connected together. They had not, indeed, any-
thing like the ingenious method of division of
labour that we find in the social medusae ; in
fact, the sponges are in all respects much more
lowly organised animals than the medusae. But
they were certainly true animals. And in the
middle of his efforts to prove this Haeckel tra-
velled into an entirely new field of research, lying
far beyond the theory of individuality.
272 HAECKEL
As there is an enormous number of different
sponges, he had confined his studies from the
first to a single group of them that might be
taken as typical. He chose the calcispongiae (cal-
careous sponges), which had been the least studied
up to that time. As the name obviously implies,
these sponges form their internal framework or
skeleton, not of elastic horny fibres like the
common bath-sponge, but of solid calcareous
needles or spines. They secrete these out of the
soft substance of their bodies just as the radio-
laria do their pretty siliceous houses. Haeckel
was engaged for five years, from 1867 to 1872, in
a profound and careful study of the natural his-
tory of the calcispongiae. Then he published the
results in his Monograph on the Calcispongice,
consisting of two volumes of text and an atlas of
sixty fine plates.
The first result was that the calcispongiae
afforded a splendid proof of the impossibility of
drawing sharp limits between species in the per-
petually developing animal world. In their case
the different varieties passed constantly out of
each other and back into each other in a way
that would have made a classifier of the old type
distracted. But Haeckel had travelled far beyond
the position of his boyhood, when he had timor-
ously concealed the bad species that would not
fit into the system. He said humorously that in
the case of the calcispongise you had the choice
of distinguishing one genus with three species, or
three genera with 239 species, or 113 genera with
ERNST HAKCKEL, 1874.
To face p. 272.
GROWTH OF IDEAS 273
591 species. All this confusion was saved by the
Darwinian idea of not setting up absolutely rigid
classes, families, genera, and species. But even
this was not yet the essential point.
As he had done in the case of the siphonophores,
Haeckel endeavoured to derive as much informa-
tion as possible from the " ontogeny," or embryonic
development, of the calcispongise. He established
in some cases, it seemed to him, that a single
calcisponge-individual at first 'and up to a certain
stage developed from the ovum in the same way
as a medusa or a coral or an anemone. The fer-
tilised ovum, a single cell, divided into two cells,
then several, and at last formed a whole cluster of
cells. In this cluster the cells arranged themselves
at the surface, and left a hollow cavity within.
Then two layers of cells were formed, like a double
skin, in the wall of this vesicle, and an opening
was left at one spot in the wall of it. Thus we
got a free- swimming embryo, with a mouth, an
external skin, and an internal digestive skin or
membrane. Then the creature attaches itself to
the floor of the sea and becomes a real sponge,
partly by developing along its characteristic lines,
and partly (in most cases) by producing other
sponges from itself in the form of buds, like the
siphonophore, and so forming an elaborate colony,
to which we give collectively the title of " a
sponge." These facts led to the following re-
flections.
This original development from the ovum, first
into an embryo with the form of a small globe or,
18
274 HAECKEL
more correctly, an oval body consisting of two
layers of cells and having a hole at one pole in
other words, a creature with nothing but skin,
stomach, and mouth was found, curiously enough,
in other animals besides the medusae, corals, and
sponges. We have the same course of develop-
ment in representatives of the most varied groups
of animals. There are worms, star-fishes, crabs,
and snails that develop in the same way. In fact,
it was proved in this very year (1867) that the lowest
of the vertebrates, the amphioxus (or lancelet),
develops in the same way. And this was not all.
In the ontogeny of all the higher animals right
up to man (inclusive) we find a state of things
that most closely resembles the same development.
At all events, the fertilised ovum gives rise in all
cases to a cluster of cells ; this cluster forms
something like a flattened or elongated vesicle
with a single-layered wall ; the single layer of cells
is doubled, and in the building up of the body one
half makes the external coat or skin and the other
half the internal lining or membrane. Haeckel
reflected on the whole of the facts, and drew
his conclusions. This very curious agreement
in the earlier embryonic forms must be interpreted
in terms of the biogenetic law. In the case of
the higher animals the forms have been profoundly
modified by cenogenesis. In the lower animals
they are almost or altogether a pure recapitulation
of the real primitive course of the development
of the animal kingdom. In the earliest times
animals were evolved in something like the follow-
GROWTH OF IDEAS 275
ing way. First, the primitive unicellular protozoa
came together and formed crude social bodies,
clusters of cells that kept together, but had no
special division of labour. As all the members in
the cluster pressed to the surface, in order to
obtain their food, they came to form, not a solid
mass of cells, but a hollow vesicle with a wall
of cells. Then the first division of labour set in.
Certain cells, those that were situated at the
anterior pole, and so were better placed to receive
the floating food as the animal moved along,
became the eating-cells of the group; they pro-
vided nourishment for the others, as the nutritious
sap circulated through all the cells in the cluster,
as we find in the case of the siphonophores. As
these feeding-cells multiplied rapidly at the fore
part of the animal, a depression was formed at that
pole of the body. In the end the ball or vesicle
was doubled in upon itself, until it came to have
the form of a cup with a double-layered wall.
Externally were the cells in the skin that effected
movement and feeling, and afforded protection ;
inside, forming the internal wall, were the eating-
or stomach-cells. An opening remained at the
top the opening of the cup or vase-like body.
The food entered by it : it was virtually the
" mouth." Thus was formed a primitive multi-
cellular animal with division of labour. If we
imagine it attaching itself to the bottom by its
lower pole, we can see that it would easily become
a sponge of the simplest kind, a polyp, a coral, or,
detaching itself once more, a medusa. If we
276 HAECKEL
imagine it swimming ahead in the water or
creeping along the ground in such a way as to
assume a bilateral symmetrical structure, like a
tube, with right and left, back and belly, and
an anus behind, we have a worm. This worm
developed, under the action of the Darwinian
laws, into a star-fish in one case, a crab or insect
in another, a snail or mussel in another, and
lastly into the amphioxus, which led on through
the vertebrates to the human frame. But the
mysterious series of forms always remained in
the development of the individual from the egg,
pointing more or less clearly to the earlier stages :
ovum, cluster of cells, ball, two cell-layers in a
cup-shaped form, skin, stomach, and mouth. All
animals that exhibit this primitive scheme belong
to one great stem. It was not until this skin-
stomach-mouth animal was formed that the tree
branched out evolving into sessile, creeping,
swimming, and other forms. Let us give a name
to this phylogenetic (ancestral) form, which stands
at the great parting of the ways in the animal
world, as embryology proves. Leaving aside its
innumerable relatives in the primitive days, it
must have differed essentially from all other living
things at the time all the protists and the plants
by its possession of a skin, stomach, and mouth.
Gaster is the Greek for stomach. Let us, there-
fore, call this primitive parent of all the sponges
polyps, medusae, worms, Crustacea, insects, snails,
mussels, cephalopods, fishes, salamanders, lizards,
birds, mammals, and man, the gastrcea, the primi-
GROWTH OF IDEAS 277
tive-stomach or primitive-gut animal. The cor-
responding embryonic form may be distinguished
from it as the gastrula. There are still many
living species of animals that are very little
higher in organisation than the gastrsea-form.
The Pemmatodiscus gastrulaceus, discovered by
Monticelli in 1895, corresponds entirely to it.
And the gastrula is found, as I said, with astonish-
ing regularity in its precise gastrsea-form in
representatives of all the higher groups of animals.
That is an outline of the famous gastrsea-
theory, that Haeckel discovered when he was
engaged in studying the calcisponges. It was
first published in his large Monograph on tlie Gal-
cispongicz in 1872, elaborated in his Studies of
the Gastrcea-theonj in 1873, 1875, and 1876
(published in one volume in 1877), and generally
expounded, together with the biogenetic law, in
(amongst other works) his polemical essay, " The
aims and methods of modern embryology" (1875).
This discovery, in HaeckePs opinion, now made
the biogenetic law a real search-light in the
exploration of the obscure past. It indicated a
third critical point in the great genealogical tree.
Already we had the root (the monera) and the
crown (man) ; now we had the point from which
the various real animal stems radiated like the
umbellate branches of a single large bloom.
Through it the Darwinian system had been
converted into the greatest practical reform of
animal classification. If this gastrsea-theory
was correct, it was an incalculable gain for
278 HAECKEL
zoology. The difficulty of it, on the other hand,
lay in the infinite modifications of the embryonic
processes in detail that had been brought about
by cenogenesis ; almost everywhere this had more
or less obscured the original features. On the
whole it gave rise to the greatest and most
far-reaching discussion that has taken place in
zoology for the last thirty years, apart from the
Darwinian theory itself. To-day, at the close
of these three decades, there are only two alterna-
tives. One is that there is still an absolutely
mysterious and hidden law of ontogeny, that
compels countless animals over and over again
to pass through these embryonic forms and
assume a likeness to the gastraea. After all the
eagerness with which the whole school of embryo-
logists opposed to Haeckel have sought, up to
our own day, to establish such a direct law, we
have not yet got the shadow of a clear formulation
of it. The other alternative is that Haeckel is
right in believing that he has discovered the
correct formula in his phylogenetic interpretation
of embryonic processes in accordance with the
biogenetic law. If that is so, the gastraea-theory
is the crown of all his labours in technical zoology
proper. Let us wait another thirty years.
The scientific controversy over the gastraea-
theory was in full swing when Haeckel entered
upon another bold experiment in the direction
of the biogenetic law. He thought it would be
useful, instead of framing wider hypotheses, to
take one single instance of one of the highest
GROWTH OF IDEAS 279
animals, and trace the whole parallel of its em-
bryonic and ancestral development down to its
finest details. It would serve as an excellent
object-lesson. He would take it, not from some
remote corner of the system, such as the sponges or
medusae, but from the very top of the tree, where
palingenesis and cenogenesis seemed to have
culminated in an inextricable confusion. But what
example could be more appropriate and effective
than the most advanced of all living things
man. He would write a monograph on man on
an entirely new method; would show ontogeny
and phylogeny confirming each other down to
the smallest detail. It was another great enter-
prise. And this particular subject was so inte-
resting that it would appeal strongly to the general
readers of his History of Creation as well as to
the academic scientists. Man was a subject of
such obviousness and importance to the layman
that in this case there was really no professional
limitation of interest at all. Every detail in the
most technical treatment of the subject would be
taken into account, and evoked his strongest
sympathy.
When Haeckel had fully matured this plan,
he produced his Antliropogeny* The word,
founded on the Greek, means the " genesis " or
" evolution of man."
The work is a very able combination of two
* The fifth edition is translated into English, with all the
plates and illustrations, under the title of The Evolution of
Man. [Trans.]
280 HAECKEL
different (aims. On the one hand it affords the
technical student the outline of a wholly new
and distinctive manual of human embryology
(up to a certain extent) and general anatomy ;
and this is intimately bound up by his method
with a kind of historical introduction to general
anthropology. At the same time the book forms
a second part of the History of Creation. It
builds up the most important chapter of the
later work, from the philosophical point of view,
namely, that which deals with the origin of man,
into a fresh volume ; and it represents the first
popular treatment of embryology on broad philo-
sophic lines a thing that had never been at-
tempted before. Springing up from this double
root, the work is certainly one of the most suc-
cessful things in the whole of Haeckel's literary
career. Moreover, it is not merely a compendium
of a larger work, like the History of Creation. In
spirit and form it is an original work, and gives
his very best to the reader. As far as its
general eSect is concerned, the double-address of
the work has had its disadvantages. The academic
students who were hostile to it have once more
selected for attack certain excrescences and gaps
that were merely due to the exigencies of popular
treatment. On the other hand, the general
reader found it, in spite of the popular form, on
which Herculean labour had been spent one has
only to think of the details of embryology a
book that was not to be "read" in the ordinary
sense of the word, but studied. The first edition
GROWTH OF IDEAS 281
appeared in 1874. A fifth edition has now been
published, equipped with the finest illustrations,
both from the artistic and the scientific point of
view, that have ever appeared in a popular work
on embryology. We find in the Anthropogeny
all that the nineteenth century has learned or
surmised with regard to the ancestral history of
mankind. Even the gastraea-theory the gastrasa
belonging to man's direct ancestry is dealt with
in popular fashion as far as this was possible.
When the Antliropogeny was published HaeckePs
public position became more stormy than ever.
In professional circles a number of the embryolo-
gists had taken up an attitude of opposition to
him ; the most heated of them attacked his
popular works continually on the ground that
he was popularising, not the real results of
official science, but his own personal opinions.
There was a great deal of truth in that. The
only question was, which would stand best with
the future, his or their personal opinion ? It does
not alter the subjectivity of opinions that a few
people here and there combine and pretentiously
constitute themselves into a " science. " Posterity
will deal coolly enough with their collective
decisions. It will take every man of science as an
individual, and merely ask which of them came
nearest to the truth. The name, the official
science, will pass into the grave with many titles
and decorations. All that will remain in men's
minds is the star of the personality in its relation
to the great constellation of contemporary human
282 HAECKEL
truth. However, as regards the particular
embryological attacks of these opponents, it seems
to me to-day especially characteristic that such
people are more and more abandoning the idea
that it is only a question of contesting certain
particular deductions of Haeckel's within the
limits of Darwinism. They find themselves
increasingly compelled to throw Darwinism
overboard altogether. Instead of its attempts
to explain phenomena they are putting forward
a confused claim of " direct mechanical explana-
tions," or relying on the sonorous old phrase,
started in 1859, an " immanent law of evolution,"
or retreating into a despairing attitude of " I don't
know." These clearer divisions will make it
very much easier for posterity to pass its judg-
ment on the situation.
After the embryologists we have a considerable
group of opponents on the anthropological side.
The objections of these anthropological critics
have in the course of time narrowed down to the
single argument that no transitional form between
man and the ape has yet been discovered. And
for many years now this position has not been
held on serious scientific grounds, but rather on
ingenious and strained hypotheses. Because we
now have, in the bones found at Java by Eugen
Dubois in 1894, the remains of a being that
stands precisely half-way between the gibbon and
man. Hence what is called the anti-Darwinian
and especially anti-Haeckelian school of anthro-
pology to-day is mainly distinguished for its
GROWTH OF IDEAS 283
preference of more risky and more subtle hypotheses
instead of plain conclusions from obvious facts.
Finally, there is the theological opposition to
Haeckel that increased with every book in which
he put his ideas before the general public and
helped them (in their boundless professional
wisdom) to realise the danger of the situation.
The year 1877 was a critical one in this respect.
In the middle of his struggles Haeckel retained
all the simplicity of his nature. He saw that the
idea of evolution was triumphing over all obstacles
and rapidly securing the allegiance of the best
men of the time. On the 18th of September, 1877,
he spoke of this with unrestrained delight at
the scientific congress at Munich. He described
the theory of evolution as u the most important
advance that has been made in pure and applied
science." Then Rudolf Virchow delivered a
speech at the same congress.
There is no doubt whatever that in the period
since Virchow had indicated a neutral field in
1863, in which science might eSect " its com-
promise," Haeckel had boldly invaded that
province. In the previous year he had published
a little work called The Perigenesis of the Plas-
tidules, or the Generation of Waves in Vital
Particles. It was delivered in lecture-form at the
medical-scientific congress at Jena in November,
1875, and then printed on the occasion of Seebeck's
jubilee, May 9, 1876. Possibly it is the least
known of all Haeckel's works, though in my
opinion it is one of the most valuable in regard
or
OF CIVIL
CALIFORNIA
284 HAECKEL
to the prophetic breadth of its intuition. It essays
to establish a theory of heredity. In dealing with
this deepest mystery of life psychic factors are
pressed into service without reserve. Not only is
the cell-soul put into prominence, but the cell
in turn is resolved into a number of smaller units,
the plastidules. Each plastidule is then conceived
as a psychic unity. The souls of the plastidules
are endowed with memory; that is the root of
heredity. They learn; that is the psychological
expression of adaptation. The little work offers
a suggestion of a psychology of Darwinism that
may very well become the nucleus of the whole
Darwinian structure in the twentieth century.
But at the time it was quite obvious that a man
with such ideas as these was breaking with lusty
fist through the sacred net that spread before
Virchow's reserved province. The hour had come,
therefore, for Virchow to feel that he must expel
the idea of evolution from the whole field of
science, and not merely from embryology and
anthropology.
It is very instructive to note how Virchow
shifted his position a little in accordance with the
time. In his judgment science had to make
peace. It had to make concessions in certain
directions. In 1863 he had spoken of the " ruling
Churches." Now, in 1877, he speaks of the
freedom of science in the " modern State." The
great KulturJcampf had set in. The Church was
for the time being powerless in face of the State.
Hence Virchow now plays off the State as the
GROWTH OF IDEAS 285
guardian of his tabooed province. This time
Darwinism is supposed to be threatening the virgin
field in which we exact scientists make our peace
with the State. At the right moment he adroitly
points out that the Social Democrats have taken to
Darwinism. Every man on deck, then. That
must not go any further. At the bottom it was
the old contest, If one lays down as a general
principle that the scientific pursuit and present-
ment of truth has to respect neutral provinces and
make concessions, every change in current affairs
will demand a fresh application of it. To-day it is
some Church or other, to-morrow a State, the next
day the momentary code of morals, and lastly
some bumbledom or other that renews the pro-
hibition to dissect corpses, because our dissecting
knives disturb the peace of mind of our Philistine
neighbours. Haeckel published a sharp reply to
Virchow (Free Science and Free Teaching, 1878),
in which he sought to show amongst other things,
taking his stand on his political principles, that
Socialism and Darwinism have nothing to do with
each other.
I will not go more fully into the controversy
here. If one province of knowledge is to receive
light from another at all, we must admit that
there is only one general truth. All stationary
or reactionary political interest is irreconcilable
with the theory of evolution. That is clear from
the very meaning of the words. As to the direction
in which we must seek real political and social
progress opinions are bound to differ very con-
286 HAECKEL
siderably; it may be shown that the laws of
evolution which have selected the various species
of plants and animals can only be used very
sparingly and cautiously for the promotion of
human progress. But I believe that is quite an
immaterial point in this matter of Virchow's
attack. The real influence of Darwinism on
political questions is not the chief question. The
principle we have to determine is whether the
freedom of scientific research and the teaching of
what the individual student believes he has dis-
covered to be true are to have " external "
restrictions or not. The question is whether
inquiry and teaching are to be regarded merely
as things " tolerated" and interfered with at will
amongst the various elements of modern life; or
whether they are not to be considered the very
bed-rock of civilisation, and every agency that has
power for the moment is not doomed whenever
it comes into collision with them.
In this momentous duel of the two men who
were regarded at the time as unquestionably the
most distinguished scientists in Germany it seemed
to most people for a time that Haeckel had gone
off altogether into general and public questions
with regard to the aim of research and philosophy.
He seemed to lend colour to the belief as he
published, in quick succession, a number of new
popular lectures (Cell-souls and Soul-cells, 1878,
and The Origin and Evolution of the Sense-
organs, 1878), and at the same time published
a collected volume of older and recent Essays
GROWTH OF IDEAS 287
on the Theory of Evolution (one part in 1878, a
second in 1879, and a new and enlarged edition in
1902). As a matter of fact, we find him in these
years occupied with a small but particularly
well-lit field of his whole work. It was not
merely that in a few years he buried himself in
the primitive forests of Ceylon, in order to pursue
his special studies far removed from all civilisation
for months together. Just at this date appeared
the great monograph on the medusae, which he
had at length concluded. The first volume (The
System of the Medusa, with 40 coloured plates)
was published in 1879, and the second (The
Deep-sea Medusce of the Challenger Expedition
and the Organisms of the Medusce, with 32 plates)
in 1881. And while these splendid volumes
showed his academic colleagues that he had no
mind to remain entirely on the outer battlements
as a philosophic champion, he plunged up to the
ears in a new special study of a range that would
have made even the most enthusiastic specialist
recoil.
From December, 1872, to May, 1876, the English
had conducted a peaceful enterprise that will be
for ever memorable. A staff of distinguished
naturalists had gone on the ship Challenger to
explore the depth, temperature, and bottom of
remote seas. With the aid of the best appliances
specimens of the mud from the floor of the ocean
(sometimes more than a mile in depth) were
brought up at 354 different spots. It was known
from earlier deep-sea explorations that this slime
288 HAECKEL
on the floor of the ocean, from a certain coast-liinit
into the deepest parts, is composed for the most
part of the microscopically small shells of little
marine animals. The living creatures that form
these shells swim in the water of the ocean, partly
at the surface and partly at various depths beneath
it. When they die the little hard coat of mail
sinks to the bottom, and as there are millions upon
millions of them living in the sea, thick deposits
are gradually formed at the bottom that consist
almost entirely of these microscopic shells. The
animals in question are primitive little creatures
consisting of a single cell, of the type that Haeckel
has called "Protists." Even in Ehrenberg's time
it had been noticed that amongst the shells in the
deep-sea mud there were, besides chalky shells, a
number of graceful flinty coats that clearly pointed
to the radiolaria. The Challenger expedition now
made the great discovery that vast fields at the
floor of the ocean, especially of the Pacific, were
covered almost exclusively with these flinty shells.
It was seen at once that the few hundred species
of radiolaria that had hitherto been described by
Haeckel and others were only a very small part of
the masses of radiolaria found in the ocean. The
specimens of the deposits which were carefully
preserved and brought home by the Challenger
contained such an immense number of unknown
species with their flinty shells faultlessly preserved,
that it was necessary to reconstruct the whole of
this wonderful group of animals. And who could
be better qualified for the work than the man
GROWTH OF IDEAS 289
who had already made a name by his study of the
radiolaria, Haeckel ?
When the English Government came to publish
the results of the Challenger expedition in a
monumental work (of fifty volumes), he was
entrusted with the work on the siphonophores, the
corneous sponges, and all the radiolaria in the
collection. For ten years, from 1877 to 1887,
Haeckel devoted every available hour to the
work of selecting the radiolarian shells with his
microscope from these specimens of the deep-sea
deposits, and naming, describing, and drawing the
new species. When he began his task 810 species
of radiolaria were known to science. When he
came to his provisional conclusion, ten years
afterwards, though his material was not yet
exhausted, there were 4,318 species and 739 genera.
They are described in the splendid work that he
wrote for the Challenger Keport. It consists of
two volumes of text (in English) with 2,750 pages
and 140 large plates, with the title, Eeport on the
Eadiolaria collected by H.M.S. Challenger. In
the preparation of these plates (and in the illus-
tration of all his later works) he had the very
valuable assistance of the gifted Jena designer and
lithographer, Adolph Giltch. A good deal of new
information with regard to the living body of the
radiolaria had come to light since 1862. In
particular it had now been settled beyond question
that they consisted merely of a single cell. There
was, therefore, a good opportunity of reconstructing
the Monograph of 1862 with the new and more
19
290 HAECKEL
comprehensive work. The chief contents of the
English work (with a selection of the plates) were
then published in German, and appeared in 1887
and 1888 as the second, third, and fourth parts
of the Monograph on the Eadiolaria. A sort of
supplementary essay on the methods of studying
the radiolaria and cognate " planet on" animals was
published separately with the title of Planctonic
studies (1890). Though it was a moderate and
tactful criticism of the methods of some of his
colleagues in this kind of work, it was " refuted"
by them in a way that it would be difficult to
qualify in other words, it was fruitlessly assailed
with charges of the most general but most un-
pleasant character. In the English Report we find
two other volumes afterwards from Haeckel the
volume on the siphonophorae in 1888, and the
Report on the Deep-sea Keratosa collected by H.M.8.
Challenger in 1889; these again opened up new
chapters in zoology. The Challenger work is the
crown of Haeckel's studies as a specialist. To some
extent the conclusion of it closes an epoch in his life.
We will only touch briefly on what he has done
since. It has not yet passed into the region of history.
The latest years in Haeckel's constructive work
are characterised mainly by one idea. He had
often been pressed to work up afresh the material
of his General Morphology. He has not done so in
the form that was expected, but chose a form of
his own. In the first place he took the systematic
introduction to the second volume, which had been
the first able attempt to draw up the genealogical
GROWTH OF IDEAS 291
tree of the living world, branch by branch, and,
with the material that had accumulated in the
subsequent thirty-four years, built it up into a
separate work. It had consisted formerly of 160
pages : now it formed three volumes of 1,800 pages.
There were forty years of incessant study embodied
in it. It had the title Systematic Phylogeny : *
" a sketch of a natural system of organisms on the
basis of their stem-history. " The first volume
(dealing with the protists and plants) appeared in
1894 ; the second volume (dealing with the in-
vertebrate animals) in 1896, and the third (dealing
with the vertebrates) in 1895. Closely connected
with it is his special systematic study of the
stem-history of the echinoderms (star-fish, &c.),
with particular reference to paleontology (The
amphoridea and cystoidea in the Work in Com-
memoration of Karl Gegeribaur, 1896).
His academic colleagues had hardly begun to
master this new phylogeny when Haeckel once
more roused a general agitation by working up the
philosophic nucleus of the Morphology in a more
general form than he had done in the History of
Creation. This new work was The Riddle of the
Universe , " a popular study of the Monistic philo-
sophy." t It was, he declared, his philosophical
testament. In a few months 10,000 copies of the
work were sold, and a later cheap popular edition
* It has not been translated into English. A recent re-
viewer in Nature pronounced it to be Haeckel' s best work.
[Trans.]
t Literally, the title is " World-Biddies," or " World-
Problems." [Trans.]
292 HAECKEL
ran to more than 100,000 copies. It has also been
translated into fourteen diSerent languages. The
controversy it excited has not yet died away.
Already a supplementary volume, The Wonders of
Life, has followed it (1904). Haeckel had been
working in this department with great vigour for
many years. He only made one appearance at a
German scientific congress since the Virchow afiair.
That was on September 18, 1882, in quiet and
uncontroversial form. A little excitement was
caused amongst those who saw their salvation in
keeping the gentle Darwin far apart from the
impetuous Haeckel when he read a rather free
philosophical confession of Darwin's. Their tactics
broke down as the deceased Darwin passed into an
historical personality and disappeared from the
struggle of contending parties. In 1892 Haeckel
wrote with great vigour in the militant Berlin
journal, the Freie Buhne, on the new alliance of the
Church and political parties in Germany, criticising
the political situation on general philosophical
principles, and in opposition to Virchow's spirit of
compromise. In the same year he delivered at
Altenburg a lecture on " Monism as a connecting
link between religion and science." In this he
took a conciliatory line, and showed how his philo-
sophic views could be reconciled with any really
sincere pursuit of truth, whatever aim it professed
to have. The address closed with the words:
" May God, the spirit of the good, the beautiful,
and the true, grant it." However, both his
criticism and his attempt at conciliation only led
ERNST HAECKEL, 1896.
From a photograph by Gabriel Max.
To face p. 292.
GROWTH OF IDEAS 293
to further and more bitter attacks in certain
quarters. His only reply was to bring out the
first numbers of a fine illustrated work a work
that came from a quite different depth of his
rich personality. This was the Art-forms in
Nature [not translated], a collection of beautiful *
forms of radiolaria, sponges, siphonophores, &c.,
for artists and admirers of the beautiful. It was a
work such as he alone could produce. " In the
storm didst thou begin : in the storm shalt thou
end," he might have said to himself, in the words
of David Strauss. The storm never left him. In
its mood was flung off with ready pen the Riddle
of the Universe. " Up, old warrior, gird thy
loins!" as we read in Strauss.
* *
*
The biographical sketch of a living man does not
close with a stroke, but with three stars. They
glow still, these stars. Under their influence much
may yet happen much struggle, much peace.
In view of the general situation of our time there is
little hope that the last stretch of this extra-
ordinary career will be spent in peace, though
behind it all lies the peace-loving soul of an
artist. But if HaeckePs career is to be one of
struggle to the last hour, he may console him-
self with the noble words of Goethe :
" And when at length the long gray lashes fall
A gentle light will broaden o'er the scene,
In whose effulgence our remoter sons
Will read the lineaments of yonder stars,
And in the loftier view to which they rise
Of God and man a loftier image hold."
CHAPTER VIII
THE CBOWNING YEAES
[By JOSEPH Me C ABE]
WHEN Professor Bolsche closed his bio-
graphical sketch in 1900 with the three
stars that " still glowed," he had little suspicion
how widely they would yet flame out before they
passed from the firmament of biography to that of
history. As it has proved, Haeckel was then only
entering upon the period of vast popular influence
which forms the closing part of his remarkable
career. He had in 1900 a few thousand thoughtful
readers in several countries beside his own. To-
day he is read by hundreds of thousands in
Germany, England, France, and Italy, and the
fourteen different translations of his most popular
work have carried his ideas over the whole world.
To-day the thoughts of this professor of zoology in
an obscure German town are discussed eagerly by
bronzed and blackened artisans in the workshops
of London, Paris, and Tokio, as well as throughout
Germany. The reader will have noticed in the
294
THE CROWNING YEARS 295
earlier chapters that the most dignified and dis-
dainful of Haeckel's opponents have been the
academic philosophers. In the year 1905 a Berlin
professor of philosophy, a stern critic of his
system, devotes a long special section of his
History of Philosophy since Kant to Haeckel and
his long-contemned speculations. Why ? Because,
to quote his concluding sentences, " the far-
reaching impulse that Haeckel has given will never
more die out. He has become a sower of the
future. The glad echo that his words have found
in a hundred thousand breasts must stir every
representative of ruling power in Church and
Science to make a closer self-examination, a closer
scrutiny of received ideas. Does not the thought
press irresistibly upon us that somehow or other
we have entered upon the wrong path in our
modern development ? " *
In an earlier chapter Professor Bolsche tells the
moving story of the writing of the General Morph-
ology : the young man making his masterly appeal
to the scientists of Germany, which he thinks they
will read over his grave. There is a singular par-
allel to this in Haeckel's attitude at the time when
Bolsche closed his work. Haeckel had just written
another " last will and testament," another proud
and defiant utterance of what he felt to be the
truth about God and man and nature. Once more
he seemed to see the marble gates at the close of
his career, and his sombre glance fell round on a
* Dr. Otto Gramzow's Geschichte der Philosophic seit Kant,
p. 503.
296 HAECKEL
world that was, he thought, sinking into reaction.
This time he appealed to the people. The five
years that have followed have witnessed an extra-
ordinary response on the part of the people.
With the speed of a popular romance his work
has flown through Europe. He has received a
hundred proofs that, at all events, the ideas he
thinks to be fraught with salvation for humanity
are being considered and discussed in wide
circles that had never before known that there
was a " riddle of the universe." He has been
urged in the heart of the Sahara to read his
own works. He has met, as he travelled on an
Alpine railway, cultured nuns who told him they
had learned evolution from " Professor Haeckel's
works." He has looked down with mingled feeling
on the wild applause of a gathering of thousands
of Socialists. He has been immortalised strangest
and last of all apotheoses in an academic history
of philosophy !
The present chapter will tell the story of these
five stirring years. It will aim at conveying
to the English reader, by plain presentment of
facts, a full picture of the activity that has
attracted or distracted the attention of so many
in the last few years. If Dr. Gramzow is right,
if through these five years of indefatigable
labour the aged scientist has become a " sower of
the future," it is well for friend and foe to
understand him.
There is only one respect in which one's
personal feeling may be allowed to tinge such
THE CROWNING YEARS 297
a narrative as this. For good or evil Haeckel's
great influence on our generation is a reality.
It is the biographer's duty to record and measure
it: the reader's to appraise it. The future
historian of the dramatic course of humanity's
ideals must be left to interpret it in cosmic perspec-
tive. Do the stars exult, or do they grow thinner
and colder in their light, over this great stirring ?
The far-distant generation, that will have reached
the summit of the hill, will know. We who, with
narrow horizon, are cutting our fond paths up
the slope, have but the poor luxuries of faith and
hope. Yet there is one aspect of Haeckel's recent
life that makes us almost forget the cosmic issues.
These five years have been, in literal truth,
" crowning years " of his aims. For all the
slights and insults that have been showered on
the grim worker he has had a rich recompense
of honour and love. Even if his ideas are to
fade and wither like his laurel crowns, it will be
something for a future historian to record that
a gentler and more genial light fell about his
closing years. As Gramzow says : " He tried to
give us his best."
An event that Professor Bolsche has only
briefly alluded to in his last crowded chapter
was a fitting inauguration of the last decade of
Haeckel's career. On the 17th of February,
1894, his sixtieth birthday was celebrated at Jena.
The lover of nature and of the silent study passes
uneasily through such functions, but the student
of Haeckel's life must dwell on it. Jena had for
298 HAECKEL
some years realised that world-fame somehow
attached to the straight, smiling figure that it saw
passing daily to the Zoological Institute. It had
witnessed the grave procedure of the boycot in the
sixties. It had heard distinguished leaders of
Churches, like Professor Michelis, brand his works
as " a fleck of shame on the escutcheon of
Germany," " an attack on the foundations of
religion and morality," " a symptom of senile
marasmus." It saw all these unworthy attacks
sink into confusion, and a new era begin. It
heard of greater universities competing for their
professor and his refusal to leave them. It saw
Bismarck fall on his neck and kiss him repeatedly
when, in 1892, he headed the deputation to invite
him to Jena ; and it noted how the Prince abso-
lutely refused to drive through their town " unless
Haeckel comes with me " in the carriage. It
gave his name proudly to one of its fine new
streets.
In February, 1894, Jena witnessed a remarkable
celebration remarkable not only to those who
had lived with him in the sixties. A marble
bust of Haeckel was unveiled by Professor Hert-
wig, with noble speech, in the Zoological Institute.
A festive dinner, such as Germans alone can
conduct, was held in the famous Luther-Hostel.
More than a thousand letters and telegrams
poured in from all parts of the world, and scores
of journals awoke the interest of Germany. I
have before me the privately-published report on
the celebration, autographed to " Agnes Haeckel."
THE CROWNING YEARS 299
Two lists in it catch the eye. One is a list
of HaeckePs publications. Apart from his long
and numerous articles in scientific journals he
has written forty -two works (13,000 pages,
frequently quarto) in thirty-three years. All but
two are pure contributions to science : some of
them are classical monographs of original re-
search; most are beautifully illustrated by him-
self. The second list gives the names of those
who have contributed towards the marble bust
by Professor Kopf, of Kome. It is worthy of
science. It includes five hundred university
professors and heads of academic institutions in
all parts of the world, from Brazil and the States
to Algiers and Egypt and India. In their name
Professor Hertwig greeted Haeckel as one " who
has written his name in letters of light in the
history of science." From Italy the Minister
of Public Instruction sent the following telegram :
" Italy, that you love so much, takes cordial part '
in all the honours that the civilised nations of the
earth are heaping on you in commemoration of
your sixtieth birthday. In the name of the
Italian Universities, which love you so much and
so much admire your undying work, I send you a
heartfelt greeting and wishes for a long and happy
and active career." Dr. Paul von Ritter gave
75,000 marks [shillings] for the erection of a
monument to Haeckel at Jena when the hour
comes. He had previously given 300,000 marks
to be spent in the furtherance of Haeckel's
scientific views.
300 HAECKEL
The story so vividly unfolded by Professor
Bolsche has explained how the estrangement arose
between Haeckel and so many of his scientific
colleagues in Germany. It is not a little gratifying
to find the names of some of his critics amongst
the subscribers to his festival. The personality,
the aim, the self-sacrifice of the man, no less than
his distinguished special contributions to science,
had won a superb recognition.
In the years 1894-6 Haeckel published the
Systematic Phylogeny. " We may differ," says
Professor Arnold Lang of it, " as to the value of
special or even fundamental opinions in it, but
we must stand before this work in astonishment
and admiration : astonishment at the vast range
of his knowledge it would seem that one head
could contain no more : admiration of the intellec-
tual labour with which the various phenomena are
connected and the gigantic mass of material is
reduced to order." The Eoyal Academy of Science
at Turin judged the work the best that had been
published in the last four years of the nineteenth
century, and awarded its author the Bressa prize,
a sum of 10,000 lire.
In August, 1898, he made a further visit to
England. The International Congress of Zoology
met at Cambridge, and Haeckel was invited to
deliver an address. He chose his ever-present
theme the evolution of man. The long lecture,
or essay, has been translated by Dr. Gadow under
the title, The Last Link The title is somewhat
misleading, as only a page or two are devoted to
< 2
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.3
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u
THE CROWNING YEARS 301
" the last link." Otherwise the little work offers
students a most excellent summary of " our
present knowledge of the evolution of man," the
title which Haeckel gave it.
But the last period of Haeckel's career is
associated chiefly with, and is really inaugurated
by his now famous Riddle of the Universe, published
in 1899. To understand that work, to avoid the
extremes of praise and censure that have been
lavished on it, one must put oneself in HaeckePs
position at the close of the last century. Mr.
Wells has given us a forecast of the coming
social order in which the intellectual few are
separated by a wider and deeper gulf than ever
from the workers and the women of the world.
That keen-eyed and judicious social writer has
already modified his forecast, but there were
symptoms enough of the possibility of such an
issue a few years ago. In Germany the signs
were ominous to a man like Haeckel. The older
Liberalism to which he belonged by tradition and
conviction seemed in danger of being ground to
dust between the upper and the nether stones of
the new political mill the increasing strength of
Social Democracy and the increasing and con-
sequent alliance of Conservative Kaiserism with
the still powerful Catholic Church. Haeckel
distrusted the power of Demos much as Benan
did when he wrote his sombre dialogues in the
seventies ; and a political alliance with the Vatican
opened out to him the grim prospect of a return
to the Middle Ages. The freedom of research
302 HAECKEL
and teaching for which he had fought with
unsparing vigour was, he thought, imperilled by
the new alliance, no less than the very existence
of culture was endangered by the triumph of
Social Democracy. His academic colleagues
remained in that isolation which he had ever
bitterly resented.
In face of this situation, which seemed to grow
more sombre as the last years of the century
dragged on, his zeal for truth and progress had
but one outlet. He must appeal to the people.
He must take the conclusions he had so laboriously
worked out in his Systematic Phytogeny, and trans-
late them from scientific hieroglyphics into a
demotic tongue. He must nail his theses with
his own hand on the cathedral door, like the
great monk whose work seemed in danger of
perishing. The partial success of his History of
Creation was encouraging, though that work had
only penetrated into the first circle beyond the
sacred academic enclosure, and was still unknown
to the crowd. Gathering his strength for what
he believed to be his final effort, he blew a blast
that would reach the far-off shop and factory. It
must be no gentle note, no timid suggestion that
the scientific work of the nineteenth century had
thrown doubt on current religious notions. He
was quitting the stage. He believed these things
were true, were established. The world must
listen to them, must discuss them ; and then the
twentieth century would pass its informed verdict
over his grave.
THE CROWNING YEARS 303
So he wrote a vigorous, an irritating, an awaken-
ing book. It must be read in this context. The
charge of " dogmatism " so often hurled at it is not
without humour. It is generally raised by men who
in the same breath hold their truths so dogmatically
that they resent his very questions. They forget,
too, that the chief conclusions of the Biddle are
references to the larger work in which, soundly
or unsoundly, they are provided with massive
foundations of scientific material. In England
there is some excuse, as the larger work is un-
translated and unknown ; though one may resent
the critic who charges Haeckel with egoism for
his constant references to his other works and then
proceeds to ridicule the slenderness of the founda-
tions of his theories. Further, it is too often
forgotten that Haeckel opens his work with a rare
warning to the reader that his opinions are very
largely " subjective" and his command of other
subjects than biology is very " unequal." In fine,
his constant and exaggerated allusions to the
opposition he encounters from his scientific
colleagues is, for any candid reader, a sufficient
corrective of " dogmatism."
The work lit up at once a flame of controversy
that has hardly yet diminished in Germany.
Students have told me how, when some professor
dropped the well-known name in the course of his
lecture, the class would split at once into two
demonstrative sections. Ten thousand copies of
the library edition of the work were sold within
a few months, and it quickly ran to eight
304 HAECKEL
editions. This remarkable success irritated his
opponents, and the wide range of the subjects
touched in the work gave them opportunities.
Germany was deluged with pamphlets of offence
and defence. Some of Haeckel's pupils replied to
his opponents, but the master himself smiled
through the storm. His chief critics were men
with no competence in biology, and he was not
minded to comply with their stratagem of with-
drawing attention from the substantial positions
of the work. Dennert, the philologist, swept
together all the hard sayings about Haeckel that
the fierce struggle of the preceding twenty years
had produced Paulsen and Adickes, the meta-
physicians, poured philosophic scorn on his
pretensions to construct a theory of knowledge.
Adickes, in particular, met him with a vigorous
fusillade of pure Kantism. It is a curious com-
mentary on this long philosophic disdain to find
Haeckel awarded a prominent place amongst " the
philosophers since Kant."
Two points in this connection are noteworthy.
Haeckel's first sin against the ruling metaphysic
of the nineteenth century was his " na'ive realism. "
He had dared to think he could break beyond
the charmed circle of our states of consciousness.
He had dreamed that a real material world lay
here in space before the human mind came into
existence; that a living, palpitating humanity,
not a bloodless phantasm in the mind, called for
our most solemn efforts. Where the ordinary
reader saw a truism the metaphysicians recognised
THE CROWNING YEARS 305
a deadly sin, and laughed Homeric laughter.
To-day we have, both in England and Germany, a
strong claim arising amongst the metaphysicians
themselves for a return to a realist basis.
Haeckel's second and chief sin was his claim to
have thrown light on the evolution of conscious-
ness and his disdain of all study of mind that
was not grounded on evolution. To-day Gram-
zow writes : " The criticism which he makes of
Kant's theory of knowledge from the evolutionary
point of view is the greatest advance that philo-
sophy has made in that branch since Kant's time."
The most violent critics of the Eiddle were the
theologians. It would be improper here to enter
into the controversy, and indeed Haeckel has
paid little attention to his critics of late years.
Some time ago a German religious magazine was
sent to me in which one of his leading critics had
written a shameful article with the aim of aliena-
ting him from me. I at once wrote to him, and
received a letter brimming over with his hearty
laughter at the idea that he might have taken any
notice of what they said. The eminent ecclesias-
tical historian, Professor Loofs, made a ponderous
attack on his incidental reference to the birth of
Christ. As Loofs himself denied the divinity and
supernatural birth 'of Christ, Haeckel felt little
inclination to enter on a serious argument about
the human parentage. The theologian was so
much hurt that he used language, as far as was
consistent with a broad view of the theological
dignity, that came within legal limits, and then
20
306 HAECKEL
quoted to Haeckel the page and letter in the
German code on which he might take action !
But a great counterpoise to these bitter attacks
attacks that forgot, as Gramzow says, that
" there is an ethic for the critic as well as for the
man of science " had now been provided. Men
like Dr. Schmidt, Dr. Breitenbach, Professor
Bolsche, and Professor Verworn rallied to their
master, and conveyed a juster image of him
and his work to the public. The ominous
silence of the great biologists was felt to mean
that his views were, in substance, no heresy
to them. -The man's warm and enthusiastic
zeal for truth and humanity, his earnest
efforts to pierce the barriers that shut off the
treasures of science from the mass, could not be
ignored. A cheaper edition of his work was
demanded, and it was soon in the hands of more
than 150,000 readers. Country after country
imported his "gospel of Monism," the stirring
agitation spread to France, England, America,
Italy, and on until it reached Australia and Japan.
To-day fourteen translations of the Riddle bear
his teaching to the ends of the world.
Little need be 'said here of the Haeckel contro-
versy in this country. I remember well the day
when the German work was submitted to me with
a view to publication. It did not seem to have
the stuff of a conflagration in it. I hazarded a
guess that it would sell a thousand copies, and
thought that it contained so valuable a description
of the evolution of mind that it should be published.
THE CROWNING YEARS 307
It has sold, with rather less than the usual adver-
tising,, with no special machinery for pressing it
such as is at the command of religious works
it has sold about 100,000 copies. The success of
the work astounded us. While we were being
accused of " thrusting it down people's throats "
we could not have arrested its circulation, had
we wished, without positively refusing to republish
it. Indeed, the last library edition has long been
out of print, though still in frequent demand. It
has made Haeckel's a familiar name in circles
where even Spencer has been heard to be described
as " a great balloonist." Clergymen have written
to their journals saying how they heard the
Monistic philosophy discussed by groups of paviors.
Sir Leslie Stephen told me, on his death-bed, but
with a momentary flash of his old humour, how
an Orkney clergyman had written to him for
consolation, as it was circulating amongst the
fishers of that ultima tlmle.*
From the seething agitation he had aroused
Professor Haeckel cheerfully withdrew in the
autumn of 1900 to make his long journey to Java.
* The reader who desires a summary of the criticisms
passed on the work may consult Dr. Schmidt's Der Kampf um
die Weltrathsel for Germany, and my own HaeckeVs Critics
Answered for England. The only biologist of competence who
has written on it in this country is Prof. Lloyd-Morgan
(Contemporary Review, 1903), but his reply is indirect. Sir
Oliver Lodge has recently dealt with it at length in his Life
and Matter, but the distinguished physicist's conception of life
is in extreme and general disfavour with the biologists of
England.
308 HAECKEL
He now lived under the public eye, and amusing
constructions were put on his movements. Ameri-
can journalism arrived, by its peculiar methods, at
the knowledge that he had gone in quest of bones
of the " missing link." A few bones of a half-
hurnan, half-ape form had been discovered on the
south coast of Java a few years previously, and the
trained American imagination quickly constructed
a theory, which as quickly crystallised into fact.
Haeckel had been heavily subsidised by an American
millionaire to discover more bones of the ape-man
of Java. Not to be outdone, other journals added
a rival subsidy (from the American Government) and
a rival search. The sober truth was that Haeckel
had used his Bressa prize fund, with a subsidy
from the Bitter fund at Jena, to make a study of
botany and marine life in the tropics. He was
within a hundred miles of the spot where Dubois
had found his interesting relics, but made no effort
to go further. For him the evolution of man rested
on too massive a foundation for a few bones to
increase its solidity. Once more he brought home
huge cases of preparations, a large number of
sketches (some of them touched up by Verestcha-
gin, who was returning on the boat from China),
and material for the inevitable book. Aus Insu-
linde is a charming and finely illustrated work of
travel, but has not been translated.
Before he left Jena he had, with his charac-
teristic urbanity and diligence, given personal
replies to about a thousand letters he had received
apropos of his Riddle of the Universe. The episto-
THE CROWNING YEARS ,%9
lary flood rose higher than ever on his return. The
struggle had spread to England and France. He
had returned to a cauldron of controversy. He
quietly resumed his teaching at the university and
attacked his still formidable literary programme.
Day after day the aged scholar he was now in
his sixty-seventh year briskly stepped up to the
podium at the Zoological Institute and delivered his
lectures, drawing his objects with a few quick
strokes on the board or exhibiting the plates pre-
pared by Giltsch. He noted with a quiet gleam of
satisfaction that a few ladies now ventured into
the " Materialist " circle. The new century had
begun.
In 1902 he issued the cheap edition of the
Riddle, of which 180,000 copies have been sold in
Germany, with a reply to its critics. " The great
struggle for truth/' he wrote to his friend, Dr.
Breitenbach, " grows fiercer and fiercer, the more
my work is attacked by the clergy, the metaphysical
schoolmen, and the erudite Philistines. I am
continually receiving lively and sometimes enthusi-
astic letters of congratulation from all parts of the
world." In the meantime he was engaged upon
two important works, which he published in 1903.
The earlier edition of the Antliropogeny, of which
Professor Bolsche has written, was undergoing a
thorough revision. New evidence was pouring in
every year in support of his sketch of the genealogy
of humanity. Dubois had discovered what is now
admitted to be an organism midway between the
highest ape and the earliest prehistoric man.
310 HAECKEL
Selenka had published wonderful studies of the
anthropoid apes. Friendenthal and others had
shown the literal blood-relationship of the higher
apes and man by a series of beautiful experiments.
He must once more gather together the enormous
mass of facts, and marshal them with his old com-
mand. For six months he worked incessantly on
the new edition. A hundred pages of matter were
added to it, a hundred fresh illustrations. Great
and exacting as the task would have been for a
younger man, the work appeared in 1903 in a
form that silenced criticism. I need only quote a
sentence from the notice of it that was published
in the Daily Telegraph by one of our leading
literary critics, when it was issued in this country.
"It is a grand conception, this of the great
physiologist, that every man, in the brief term of
his prenatal development, should go through these
successive changes, by which man has, in countless
ages, been evolved from the primitive germ-
cell; and it is triumphantly vindicated in The
Evolution of Man. It is impossible to do justice
in words to the patience, the labour, the specialised
skill and industry involved in the preparation
of this monumental work." And one has only
to compare this latest edition with the previous
one to see at a glance the complete transformation,
and realise the freshness and force of mind of the
aged biologist.
In the face of such a work, with its towering
structure of proof from embryology, comparative
anatomy, and paleontology, one must look leniently
THE CROWNING YEARS 311
on some of Haeckel's references to fellow-anthro-
pologists like Virchow. It is not many years since
the great pathologist declared emphatically at a
scientific congress that " we could just as well
conceive man to have descended from a sheep or
an elephant as from an ape." When a leading
anthropologist could say such things in 1894, a
strain is laid on our charity. Darwin's words,
written in a letter to Haeckel, press on us once
more : " Virchow's conduct is shameful, and I trust
he will one day feel the shame of it." Professor
Eabl has lately contended that his deceased father-
in-law (Virchow) admitted the evolution of man in
private. We cannot wonder if Haeckel merely
retorts : " So much the more shame on his public
utterances." Such things must, at least, be borne
in mind when one reads Haeckel's severe judgment
on some of his great contemporaries.
The Evolution of Man not only offers the com-
plete proof of its thesis a proof accepted by every
prominent biologist in England and by many pre-
lates (such as the Bishop of London and the Dean
of Westminster) but affords also interesting proof
of Haeckel's artistic gifts. Some of the best plates
in the work are executed by him. But in the same
year, 1903, he gave a more popular evidence of it.
In detached numbers he published the large and
beautiful volume of his Art- forms in Nature. In
this work he depicts with remarkable success
hundreds of the most beautiful forms that his long
study of marine life had brought before him. A
fine expression of the man's dual nature, the work
312 HAECKEL
appeals with equal force to the aesthete and the
scientist. And during the long hours that he was
peering into his microscope and sketching the
delicate and graceful forms, the din and roar of the
mighty controversy he had aroused was breaking
in with every post. By the end of the year he had
received more than 5,000 letters in connection with
the Eiddle of the Universe. Scurrilous letters and
idolatrous letters, sober letters and fantastic letters,
flowed upon the Zoological Institute, where he
worked with pen and pencil, and were duly read.
He merely defended himself by posting to each
correspondent a printed form that he would soon
issue a new work in which the further questions
would be answered. He had given his life to
science and humanity, and would not withdraw for
the well-earned rest. And from a thousand pulpits
over Europe and America the aged and self-sacri-
ficing worker was being denounced and caricatured
to audiences who had not the remotest knowledge
of his aims and his work. A friend of mine heard
a minister in an important Glasgow church assure
his congregation from the pulpit that u Haeckel
was a man of notoriously licentious life ; " he had
heard it "from a friend of Haeckel's." At the
very time when Haeckel was buried in his splendid
artistic work, the Christian World Pulpit was
issuing a sermon in which Dr. Horton was ex-
plaining " the personal factor " in Haeckel. " He
is an atrophied soul, a being that is blind on the
spiritual side," the popular preacher declared.
From the turmoil Haeckel withdrew once more
THE CROWNING YEARS 313
to his beloved Italy. There was another reason
for his flight. His seventieth birthday was ap-
proaching. He had declared at the banquet given
in his honour on the occasion of his sixtieth birth-
day, that if he lived for the seventieth he would
" bury himself in some dark corner of the
Thuringian forest, far away from all festivities."
Strenuous and exacting as the ten years had been,
he now found himself on the threshold of his
eighth decade of life. His wife, also, was ailing,
and they both proceeded to the Italian Eiviera
at the beginning of the winter. Few of his
friends were informed where he was. "I want,"
he wrote to me, " to pass my seventieth birthday
in peace." He settled at Kapallo, and at once
commenced his favourite fishing for the tiny in-
habitants of the Mediterranean. The " cloistral
quietness " of the little town, the daily prospect
of the blue Mediterranean, " the solitary walks
in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Apennines,
and the uplifting sight of their forest-crowned
mountain-altars" restored his freshness of spirit.
Once more a vast labour lay before him. He
had promised a work that would answer all
biological questions addressed to him in the 5,000
letters of his correspondents. He had all the
queries, all the criticisms of his views, all the
latest literature of the subject, to digest into a
compact volume. The result was a new work of
557 pages, The Wonders of Life, a remarkable
summary of his zoological and botanical know-
ledge, with excursions into psychology, suicide,
314 HAECKEL
lunacy, ethnography, theology, and ethics. Its
twenty solid and well-arranged chapters were
written in four months.
"Promptly at 5," he wrote in December, "I
am awakened by the bells of the church hard
by. I write continuously until 12. After a frugal
lunch and a short rest, the afternoon is devoted
to a walk or to water-colour sketches. The longer
days allow me to sit and paint in the open air
until five. Our quiet evenings, from 5 to 10, are
spent in reading and in writing letters. The
interruption for dinner, from 7 to 8, gives us an
opportunity to exchange jokes over our ' cloistral
life.' " Thus the veteran naturalist, of " notori-
ously licentious life " (the words of the Glasgow
preacher were spoken at this very period), ap-
proached his eighth decade of life of work.
He remained at Eapallo until the birthday had
passed, but his address had meantime become
widely known, and the miniature postal arrange-
ments at Kapallo were severely taxed. Letters,
telegrams, flowers, and other gifts mostly spon-
taneous expressions of gratitude from " unknown
readers of the Riddle of the Universe " reminded
him of the larger world that now appreciated
him. A still larger number of letters and gifts
reached Jena from all parts of the world.
Hundreds of German journals and periodicals
devoted long and generous articles to the dis-
tinguished worker, and little festive commemora-
tions were held at many of the universities. At
Zurich, Professor Conrad Keller and Professor
THE CROWNING TEAKS 315
Arnold Lang delivered speeches which have since
been published. Jena sent a deputation consisting
of a number of its professors to visit the hero in
person at Rapallo. Reflecting on these remarkable
demonstrations and the extraordinary correspon-
dence that continually reaches Haeckel, one
is disposed to repeat of him the phrase applied to a
great heretical teacher of the Middle Ages, Peter
Abelard : " Never was man so loved and so
hated.' 7
A feature of the commemoration that peculiarly
gratified him was the special festive number of the
German students 7 lively periodical, Jug end, pub-
lished at Munich. On February 16th it appeared
as a "Haeckel number," full of sprightly anecdote
and generous appreciation, and bearing on its
cover a striking reproduction in colour of the
Lenbach portrait. His letter of thanks to the
journal shows that the repose and the beauty of
Italy, and the outburst of affection his birthday
has provoked, have set him perfectly atune to life
once more. " Ah ! Prithee stay, thou art so fair,"
he almost says in the Goethe phrase, as he " hails
the moment fleeing." He goes on to deprecate the
effort to make " a learned man " of him. " That,
alas, I am not. We have in Germany many
professors and teachers who are more learned, and
have read far more books than your poor Jena
schoolmaster. But from my earliest youth, since
I tore up flowers and admired butterflies in my
fourth year, I have yielded to the inclination of my
heart and studied incessantly one great book
316 HAECKEL
Nature. This greatest of all books has taught
me to know the true God, the God of Spinoza and
Goethe. Then as physician I saw human life in
all its heights and depths, and in my many travels
through half the globe I learned the inexhaustible
splendour of the earth. And I have honestly tried
with all my modest powers, to reproduce with pen
and pencil a part of what I saw, and reveal it to
my fellows. I have had to fight many a hard fight,
and in my hatred of lies and hypocrisy and
decaying traditions I have at times struck a sharp
note. But I trust, dear Youth, that thou wilt not
judge all that harshly in so old and storm-tried,
a warrior, and that thou wilt go on to stand with
me, shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the spiritual
progress of humanity, fighting in the cause of the
great trinity of the true, the good, and the
beautiful."
The work he had composed in four months at
Kapallo, The Wonders of Life, was issued on his
return. It has not had the stormy success of its
predecessor. The fact is instructive. This work
contains a fuller proof of the chief scientific
positions of the Eiddle. It is, therefore, more
technical and more difficult to read. Amongst
other matters, it contains a fine summary of
those speculations on the mathematical forms of
organisms and the idea of individuality of which
Professor Bolsche has written so appreciatively.
It must be recognised that Haeckel has fulfilled a
duty in thus providing the general reader with
a fuller biological proof of his theses. If that
THE CROWNING YEARS 317
estimable person, the general reader, betrays less
eagerness for the fuller proof, we must remember
that for ages he has been taught to disregard such
a thing as "proof." It is the general reader that
makes Haeckel didactic. It is Haeckel's opponents
who made the general reader. However, the great
bulk of The Wonders of Life is true to its title. It
is an intensely interesting summary of biological
facts. For the rest, if it contains speculations
that run beyond the evidence (though based on it)
who is better qualified to open up these new paths
than men with the enormous range of knowledge
that Haeckel has? "I agree with you," one of
the first biologists in England wrote to me recently,
" that Haeckel is one of the first living biologists.
There are not any others who have the same
wide knowledge and experience and consequent
4 point of view.' He knows his zoology, botany,
physiology, and pathology, also geology, and has
travelled, and has a keen interest in and knowledge
of no small degree of philology, archaeology, and
ethnography."
Haeckel was in Italy once more in the autumn
of 1904, and although he did little quiet travel and
no fishing for radiolaria it is probable that no visit
to the country ever afforded him such satisfaction.
One great shadow lay over the beautiful land and
its genial race whenever he visited it a gross and
almost impenetrable superstition. Turn off the
great routes of Italy, with their splendid cathedrals,
and visit the small towns and villages. See the
scum of Naples tearing the clothes from each other
318 HAECKEL
to kiss the " blood of St. Januarius." Peer into the
abysses of vice and grossness that are covered
effectually by this formal and unlovely practice of
religion. Haeckel had seen all that with sad eyes
for many a year.
In 1904 a little institution that called itself
" The International Congress of Freethinkers"
announced that it would hold its annual gathering
at Eome. The pope the new pope, friend of
the royal house lodged a feeling protest with
the authorities. The priests poured inflammatory
rhetoric over their people until violence seemed
inevitable. The Italian Government's only reply
was to grant the heretics all the privileges that
were ever given to the great Catholic pilgrimages :
to put at their disposal its finest institution, the
Collegio Eomano, and to send its Minister of
Public Instruction to open the Congress. Veteran
warriors such as Haeckel, Berthelot, Salmeron,
Sergi, Denis, and Bjornsen, gladly announced
their adhesion. Paris sent a thousand delegates ;
Spain nearly a thousand; Italy her thousands.
Whole municipalities in Italy and France (even
that of Paris) took part. The Latin world was
aflame with rebellion. We met, seven thousand
strong, in the heart of Eome, and Eome the jade
smiled prettily as we marched up the Via Venti
Settembre, as it had smiled once on processions of
Cybele, and then on processions of Catholics.
Haeckel was greeted with a wild demonstration
as he stepped on to the platform in the great
Cortile of the College. Straight and proud, white
THE CROWNING YEARS 319
with age but pink with more than the freshness of
a young man, he adjured them in futile German,
in his thin, inaudible voice, to form themselves into
a new Church, the great Association of Monists.
Few heard and less understood him, but his name
was on every heart and his reception superb.
A week afterwards I picked up a London journal
in an Italian hotel, and read as hundreds of
thousands had done that a miserable Freethought
conference had been held at Rome : that its rowdy
proceedings had disgusted the scholars who had, in
a misguided moment, lent their names to it. Thus
are we informed at times. I remembered Sergi's
enthusiastic comments at the close. " E magnifico,
e magnifico," was all he could gasp. I remembered
Haeckel's exultation as we walked home to his
Albergo Santa Chiara, and Berthelot's deep joy.
The same scholars, except Bjornsen, took part in
the Congress at Paris, in 1905, when 100,000 of us
were nobly received by the Conseil Municipal.
But Haeckel was too unwell to come. Nature has
laid her hand on him at length, and bade him
hang his weapons on the wall. He can but hope
to remain a passive spectator for a few years more
of that vast stirring of the Latin peoples which he
has so much contributed to bring about.
His last active effort was the delivery of three
lectures at Berlin in the spring of 1905. He has
always avoided public lectures as much as possible.
His poor voice and comparative nervousness make
the work unattractive. A severe attack of influenza
sapped his strength in the winter of 1905, and he
320 HAECKEL
has been unable to eliminate its unpleasant conse-
quences. But the opportunity of enforcing his
gospel in the capital of the Empire, where the
Virchows and Du Bois-Eeymonds had ruled so
long made him deaf to the counsels of prudence.
He chose as his theme the controversy in regard
to evolution, and gave three spirited lectures. The
changed world came home to him vividly enough.
A vast and enthusiastic gathering of admirers in
one of the finest halls in Berlin : outside, at the
very door, his clerical opponents distributing hand-
bills that offered a choice selection of the most
venemous attacks on his person and work. The
lectures are now available in English under the
title of Last Words on Evolution.
The present state of Haeckel's health forbids
him to hope that he will do any more active work.
As I write, he lies in his villa, in "Haeckel Street,"
overlooking the handsome Zoological Institute,
which he raised, and the little university town
that he has made known to the world. Beyond
the graceful hills that cradle it, he sees the dark
waves tossing that he has worked so hard to set in
motion. In Q-ermany the alliance of the Emperor
with the Catholics saddens him, but the Jesuits
are accepting evolution, over the fresh grave of
Virchow. Abroad his ideals, even his ideas, are
making triumphant progress. He thinks of the
vast changes that have taken place since he stood
out, almost alone, reckless of all but honour and
truth, at the Stettin Congress in 1863. "Das Leben
ist schon," he still repeats. What will men say of
THE CROWNING YEARS 321
him when the lines of history draw in, and the
critic will have the proper perspective ? I believe
no great worker ever thought less about it.
Through inexorable labour, through constant sacri-
fice, through storms of painful obloquy, he has lived
his ideals, if he has made mistakes been mortal.
Those ideals are an enduring contribution to the
good. The first, the motto of his young days,
was Impavidi progrediamur "Let us march on
fearlessly.'' The second, the motto of his later
years, was: "The good, the true, and the beautiful,
are the ideals, yea the gods, of our Monistic
philosophy."
21
Bibliography
THE following is a list of the works by Professor Haeckel
that have been translated into English :
"The History of Creation." Translation (in two vols.,
edited by B. Eay-Lankester) of the Naturliche Schopfungs-
geschichte. 1876. [4th edition, 1892.]
"Freedom in Science and Teaching." Translation (with
preface by T. H. Huxley) of the Freie Wissenschaft und Freie
Lehre. 1879.
" Beport on the Deep-sea Medusae dredged by H.M.S.
Challenger." Zoology series, vol. iv. [330 pp. and 2 plates.]
1882.
"The Pedigree of Man." Translation (by E. B. Aveling)
of the Gesammelte Populare Vortrage. 1883.
"A Visit to Ceylon." Translation (by Clara Bell) of the
Indische Reisebriefe. 1883.
" Beport on the Badiolaria collected by H.M.S. Challenger."
Zoology series, vol. xviii. [2,000 pp. 4to and 140 plates.] 1887.
"Beport on the Siphonophorae collected by H.M.S. Chal-
lenger" Zoology series, vol. xxviii. [380 pp. 4to and 50
plates.] 1888.
"Beport on the Deep-sea Keratosa collected by H.M.S.
Challenger" Zoology series, vol. xxxii. [92 pp. and 8
plates.] 1889.
324 BIBLIOGRAPHY
" Planktonic-studies." Translation (by S. W. Field) of
Plarikton-studien. 1891.
"The Confession of Faith of a Man of Science." Translation
(by J. Gilchrist) of Monismus. 1894.
"The Last Link." Translation (by Dr. Gadow) of the
Cambridge Lecture on Evolution. 1898.
11 The Eiddle of the Universe." Translation (by J. McCabe)
of Die Weltr&thsel 1901. [6th edition, 1905.]
"The Wonders of Life.'* Translation (by J. McCabe) of
Die Lebenswunder. 1904.
"The Evolution of Man." Translation (by J. McCabe) of
the 5th edition of the Anthropogenie. [905 pp., 512 illus-
trations, and 30 plates.] 1905.
" Last Words on Evolution." Translation (by J. McCabe) of
Der Kampf um den Enttuickelungs-Gedanken. 1906.
COMPLETE LIST OF PEOF. HAECKEL'S WOEKS
(EXCLUSIVE OP ARTICLES IN SCIENTIFIC PERIODICALS, ETC.)
" De telis quibusdam Astaci fluviatilis." Dissertatio inaugu-
ralis histologica. [48 pp. and 2 plates.] 1857.
" De rhizopodum finibus et ordinibus." Diss. pro venia
legendi impetranda. 1861.
"Die Eadiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria)." [Vol. i., 572 pp.
fol ; vol ii., 35 plates.] 1862.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 325
"Beitrage zur Naturgeschichte der Hydromedusen. Die
Familie der Biisselquallen (Medina Geryonida)." [204 pp.
and 6 plates.] 1865.
"Generelle Morphologie der Organismen." [Vol. i, xxxii
and 574 pp. and 2 plates; vol. ii., clx and 462 pp. and 8
plates.] 1866.
"Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte." [568 pp. and 9 plates.]
1868. [10th edition, 1902.]
" Uber die Bntstehung und den Stammbaum des Menschen-
geschlechts." 1868.
" Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Siphonophoren."
Crowned by the Utrecht Society of Art and Science. [124 pp.
4to and 14 plates.] 1869.
" Uber Arbeitstheilung in Natur und Menschenleben."
1869.
" Das Leben in den grossten Meerestiefen." 1870.
" Biologische Studien." [184 pp. and 6 plates.] 1870.
" Die Kalkschwamme (Calcispongia)." [Vol. i., xvi and 484
pp. ; vol ii., 418 pp. ; vol. iii., 60 plates.] 1872.
" Anthropogenic, oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Men-
schen." [xviii and 732 pp., 12 plates, and 210 woodcuts.]
1874.
" Arabische Korallen." 1875.
" Die Perigenesis der Plastidule oder die Wellenzengung der
Lebenstheilchen." 1876.
" Studien zur Gastrseatheorie." [270 pp. and 14 plates.]
1877.
"Die heutige Entwickelungslehre im Verhaltnisse zur
Gesammtwissenschaft." 1877.
" Freie Wissenschaft und Freie Lehre." [106 pp.] 1878
326 BIBLIOGRAPHY
" Das Protistenreich." [104 pp., 58 woodcuts.] 1878.
" Gesammelte populate Vortrage aus dem Gebiete der
Entwickelungslehre." [181 pp., 50 woodcuts.] 1878.
"Das System der Medusen." [xxx and 672 pp. and 40
plates.] 1879.
" Gesammelte populare Vortrage." Vol. ii. [164 pp. and 30
woodcuts.] 1879.
" Das System der Acraspeden." [312 pp. and 20 plates.]
1880.
" Metagenesis und Hypogenesis von Aurelia aurita. [36 pp.
and 2 plates.] 1881.
" Die Tiefsee-Medusen der Challenger-Beise und der Organ-
ismus der Medusen." [205 pp. and 32 plates.] 1881.
" Indische Reisebriefe." [380 pp.] 1882.
"Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, Goethe, und Lamarck."
1882.
"Grundriss einer allgemeiner Naturgeschichte der Eadio-
larien." [248 pp. 4to and 64 plates.] 1887.
"Die Acantharien oder actipyleen Badiolarien." [32 pp.
and 12 plates.] 1888.
"Die Phseodarien oder cannopyleen Radiolarien." [32 pp.
and 30 plates]. 1888.
" Plankton-studien." [112 pp.] 1890.
"Der Monismus als Band zwischen Eeligion und Wissen-
schaft." 1892.
" Zur Phylogenie der Australischen Fauna." 1893.
" Die Systematische Phylogenie." [3 vols., 1,800 pp.]
1894.
" Die Amphorideen und Cystoideen." 1896.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 327
" Ueber unsere gegenwartige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des
Menschen." 1898.
" Die Weltrathsel." [473 pp.] 1899.
" Aus Insulinde." [260 pp., 80 illustrations.] 1901.
"Anthropogenic." [5th edition, 991 pp., 30 plates, and 512
illustrations.] 1903.
" Kunstformen der Natur." [100 large coloured plates and
text.] 1904.
" Die Lebenswunder." [567 pp.] 1904.
"Ernst Haeckel's Wanderbilder." [Series of prints of his
oil-paintings and water-colour landscapes.] 1905.
" Der Kampf um den Entwickelungs-Gedanken." [112 pp.
and 4 plates.] 1905.
Index
Adam's Peak, Haeckel on, 244
Adaptations, embryonic, 228
Adaptation to environment, 119
Adickes, Professor, 304
Adriatic, visit to the, 257
^Esthetic element in Haeckel, 83
Affinities of animals, 233
Agassiz, 229
on creation, 128
Alexander, Karl, Grand Duke of
Weimar, 254
Algeciras, Haeckel at, 252
Algiers, Haeckel arrested in, 259
Allmers, Hermann, 85
Alpine salamander, the, 221
America, the discovery of, 20
Amphioxus, the, 274
Amphoridea and Cystoidea, the,
291
Angelo, Michael, paintings of, 15
Anthropogenie, the, 279, 309
Anthropological critics, Haeckel' s,
283
Arabia, coral-fishing in, 257
Archeopteryx, the, 167, 223
Arctic hare, the, 119
Art and mathematics, 216
Art-forms in Nature, the, 26, 293,
311
Artificial selection, 117
Artistic gifts of Haeckel, 83-4
Asia Minor, travels in, 257
Aspects of Nature, 46
Association of Monists, 319
Athletic festival, Haeckel at the
173
Atom, the, 212
Aus Insulinde, 308
B
Bacilli, the, 206
Bacteria, the, 180
Basedow, 32
Belligemma, 258
Berlin, Haeckel's criticism of, 30
,, , lectures at, in 1905, 319
Berthelot, 318, 319
Bjornsen, B., 318, 319
Bible, the, 126
Biogenetic law, the, 219
Bird, evolution of the, 223
Birth of Haeckel, 29
Birthday, celebration of Haeckel's
sixtieth, 297
Birthday, celebration of Haeckel's
seventieth, 314
Birthdays, real determination of,
1(2
330
INDEX
Bismarck, esteem of, for Haeckel,
298
Bleek, Professor, 37
Bose, Countess, liberality of, 255
Botany, Haeckel's early love of, 36
Braun, Alexander, 52
Bressa prize, the, 300
Bronn, 128
Bruno, Giordano, 16
Butterfly, development of the, 227
Calcispongiae, the, 272
,, , embryology of the,
273
Calumniation of Haeckel, 266, 268
Cambridge, Haeckel at, 300
Canaries, voyage to the, 240
Catastrophic theory, the, 108
Catholicism in Germany, 301
, lower features of, 134
Cell, discovery of the, 56, 65
, nature of the, 178
Cell-soul, the, 161
Cell-souls and Soul-cells, 286
Cell-state, the, 57
, man as a, 160
Cell-theory, the, and Darwinism,
178
Cenogenesis, 231
Ceylon, Haeckel's life in, 33
, visit to, 258
Challenger expedition, the, 287
Chromacea, the, 180
Chrysaora, 176
Classical studies, 35
Classification, Haeckel's reform of,
233-4
Colombo, Haeckel at, 258
Columbus, 16, 20
Compromise, Virchow advocates,
163-171
Congresses, founding of scientific,
144
Consciousness, Virchow on, 163
Copernicus, 16
Corals of Arabia, the, 257
Craw-fish, study of the, 77
Creation, difficulties of, 98
Crystal, life of the, 203
Cuvier's theory of creation, 107
Cyanea, 176
D
Dalmatia, visit to, 257
Darwin's condemnation of Vir-
chow, 311
Darwin, Haeckel's intercourse with,
241
in South America, 103
on botany, 39
, physiognomy of, 146
,, , reasoning of, 117-20
, theism of, 124
Darwinism accepted by Haeckel,
133
" Dead " matter, 203
Death of Haeckel's wife, 184
Deep-sea Medusa, the, 287
Degree, dissertation for the, 77
Dennert, Prof., 304
I Descent of Man, the, 243
i Design, abandonment of, 169
Desmonema Annasethe the, 186
Dissection, 55
Division of labour, essay on, 249
Doctorates held by Haeckel, 24
Dogmatism, alleged, of Haeckel,
23, 218, 303
Dohrn, Anton, 59
Down, Haeckel's visit to, 241
Dubois, Eugen, 167, 309
Du Bois-Beymond, E., 135
E
Education, Haeckel on elementary,
34
Egypt, visit to, 257
INDEX
331
Ehrenberg, 78, 96
Elective Affinities, the, 45
Embryonic diagrams, Haeckel's
early, 268
Embryology, 57
,, and evolution, 170
in Haeckel's works,
268, 280
Embryology of the Siphonophoree,
the, 248
Emotional character of Haeckel,
186-7
Engelmann, 173
Erica cinerea, search for the,
37
" Ernst Haeckel Street," 43
Essay, Haeckel's first, 71
Essays on the Theory of Evolution,
287
Evolution, internal law of, 130
of species, 114
Evolution of Man, the, 279, 310
" Exact " scientists, 131, 132, 164
Extinct species, 107
Extinction of species, 112, 119
Family of Haeckel, the, 253
Filippo de Filippi, 76
Fish, nature of the, 219
FitzKoy, Captain, 103
Flora Hallensis, contribution to
the, 37
Fol, 245
For Darwin, 230
Force and Matter, 201
Forms, science of, 190-2
Form-unities, 207
Free Science and Free Teaching,
285
Freedom of research, 75, 156
French rule in Prussia, 25
Freytag, Gustav, 21, 29
Friedenthal, 310
Frog, the, 219
, evolution of the, 222
G
Galapagos Islands, Darwin in the,
116
Galileo, 16
Gandtner, 37
Gastraea, the, 276
Gastraea-theory, the, 278
Gastrula, the, 277
Gegenbaur, Karl, 62-4
Genealogical tree of organisms, 149,
152, 226
Generelle MorpJiologie, the, 188
Genius, 102
Geology, 108
,, and evolution, 167
Geryonida, the, 177
Gill-slits in the human embryo,
269
Giltsch, Adolph, 289
Glyptodon, the, 113
Gneisenau, 29
God, Haeckel's conception of, 133-5,
236
,, , the new conception of, 19
Goethe, 17
, evolution in works of , 238
on morphology, 190-1
Goethe's influence on Haeckel, 41-6
Gramzow, Otto, on Haeckel, 295
Greece, visit to, 257
Greeff, Eichard, 244
Greek, Haeckel's knowledge of, 36
Green Henry, 45
Gryptotherium, the, 113
Gude, Karl, 37
Haeckel abandons theology, 75, 133
, aesthetic element in, 83,
185
, ancestry of, 21
332
INDEX
Haeokel and Darwin, 127, 241
,, ,, Gegenbaur, 62
Miiller, 69
Virchow, 163, 284
as a physician, 80
,, traveller, 256
at Down, 241
at Stettin, 146
, birth of, 29
, boyhood of, 31-3
,, , early education of, 34-50
embraces evolution, 137
, family of, 253
, first marriage of, 100
,, goes to Jena, 100
, honours awarded to, 10,
298, 300
in Heligoland, 69
in Italy, 82
in the Canaries, 240
, medical training of, 76
,, , parents of, 28
, personal charm of, 146
, political views of, 301
,, , recent popularity of, 295
reconstructs zoology, 181
, religion of, 230
, second marriage of, 253
,, , university training of, 54
Haeckel, Councillor Karl, 29, 32
.Walter, 83
HaeckeVs Critics Answered, 307
Heine, 21
Heligoland, the first journey to, 69
Heliosphaera, the, 141
Heliozoa, the, 258
Heredity, a theory of, 284
Hertwig, Oscar, 257
Hertwig, B., 189
Histology, 56
History of Creation, the, 262
History, unity of, 44
Holy Land, travels in the, 259
Horton, Dr., on Haeckel, 312
Hiiffer, Hermann, 21
Humboldt, 46, 144
,, foundation, the, 31
Huschke, Agnes, 253
Huxley on the origin of man, 180
Illustrations, charges against
Haeckel's, 267-8
Imagination in science, 200
Independence,Haeckel's early sense
of, 31
Indische Reisebriefe, the, 261
Individuality, nature of, 207, 211
, stages of, 209
Infusoria, the, 78
International Congress of Free-
thinkers, the, 316
Irene, 176
Ischia, journey to, 87
Italy, appreciation of Haeckel in
299
, Haeckel's first visit to, 82
Java, ape-man of, 167, 308
, voyage to, 260, 308
Jena, 42
, Haeckel's first visit to, 50
Jug end, Haeckel number of, 315
Jump, Haeckel's record, 173
Jurist, Haeckel as a, 22
K
Keferstein, Professor, on Dar-
winism, 148
Keller, Gottfried, 45
Kepler, 16
Kolliker, Albert, 56
Konigsberg, Congress at, 99
Kopf, Professor, bust of Haeckel by,
299
Kiikenthal, 43
Kulturkampf, the, 284
INDEX
333
Lamprey, the, 181
Lancelot, the, 181
Lang, Professor A., on Haeckel, 300
Lange, F. A., 154
Language, evolution of, 150
Lanzarote, Haeckel at, 245
Last Link, the, 300
Last Words on Evolution, the, 320
Latin, Haeckel's knowledge of, 36
" Law of development," 129
Law, training for the, 23
Lawyers in Haeckel's family, 22
Lemur, the, 181
Ley dig, Frantz, 56
Lichtenstein, Professor, 71
Life, earliest forms of, 151
, origin of, 124
Linn6, classification of, 105
Literary production of Haeckel, 299
Lizard, evolution of the, 222
Lizzia EUzabethcz, the, 185
Lloyd-Morgan, Professor, 307
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 307
Loofs, Professor, 305
Love of nature in Haeckel, 31
Lyell's reform of geology, 109
Macrauchenia, the, 112
Mammoth, the, 106
Man, creation of, 126
, evolution of, 180-1, 279
Man's genealogical tree, 181
Marine animals, study of, 60
Marriage, Haeckel's first, 100
second, 253
Mastodon, the, 112
Materialism and idealism, 83, 154
Mathematical types of form, 214
Matter, potentialities of, 204
Mechanical embryology, 249
Medical studies of Haeckel, 72
Medusa, the, 174, 246
Megatherium, the, 106, 112
Merseburg, 30
Messina, 90
Metaphysics, Haeckel's views on,
304
Method, analysis of scientific, 200
Meyer, Frau, 253
Microscope, beauty in the, 92
Miklucho-Maclay, 245
Miracles in modern Italy, 134
" Missing link," the, 308
Mitrocoma Annce, the, 185
Moleschott, 83, 154
Monera, the, 179
Monism, 73, 203, 217
Monism as a Connecting Link, the
292
Monograph on the Calcispongitz,
the, 272
Monograph on the Medusce, the,
185
Monograph on the Monera, the,
182
Monograph on the Radiolaria, the,
100, 138
Monophyletic theory of life, the,
158
Morphology, the science of, 190
,, , history of, 199
Mosaic story of creation, 105, 108
Mottoes, Haeckel's, 321
Mouth, the primitive, 275
Miiller, Fritz, 230
,, , Johannes, 65-8
. , death of, 80
Miiller-net, the, 69
Munich, Haeckel and Virchow at,
157, 283
Murray, Sir John, 259
N
Naples, Haeckel at, 87
Natural law, relativity of, 232
philosophy, 48
334
INDEX
Natural selection, 119-120
Nature and God, 20
Naturalist's Voyage round the
World, 46
Nausicaa phaacum, the, 185
Nineteenth century, work of the,
18
Nomenclature, scientific, 185
Nucleus, the, 179
Oken, L., 144
on embryonic development,
224
Ontogeny, 231
Optimism of early Darwinians, 166
Origin and Evolution of the Sense-
organs, 286
Origin of Species, the, 122
Over-individuals, 247
Ovi di mare, 93
Ovum, the, 268, 273
, discovery of the, 58
Paleontology, 149
Palingenesis, 231
Pampas, fossil remains in the, 112
Paris, Freethought Congress at,
319
Pathology, Virchow's reform of, 57
Paulsen, Professor, 304
Peak of Teneriffe, Haeckel climbs
the, 250
Pelagic sweepings, 70
Pemmatodiscus gastrulaceus, the,
277
Persephone-impulse, the, in
Haeckel, 256
Philosophy and observation, 156
and science, 202
Philosophy, Haeckel's work in,
305
Phylogeny, 231
Physician, Haeckel as a, 80
, qualities of the, 53
Pithecanthropus, the, 167, 308
Plankton, 70
Plankton-studies, 290
Plant or animal, priority of the
205
Plastidules, 284
Political views of Haeckel, 301
Polyps, 175
Popular works, why written, 262
Potsdam, Haeckel's birthplace, 30
Private teacher, Haeckel as, 100
Profession, choice of a, 53
Professor of Zoology, Haeckel
appointed, 100
Progressive evolution, 168
Promorphology, 215
Protestant religion, character of
the, 134
Protists, the, 206
Protistology, 206
Puerto del Arrecise, 250
Pupa, the, 227
B
Rabl, Professor, 311
Radiolaria, the, 93, 289
, shells of the, 95
., , system of the, 140
Rapallo, Haeckel at, 313
Realism of Haeckel, 304
Beport on the Deep-sea Keratosa,
the, 290
Report on the Radiolaria, the, 289
Riddle of the Universe, the, 22,
291, 301-7
Bitter, Paul von, donation of, 255,
299
Riviera, marine study on the, 76
Rocks, formation of the, 109
Roederer, 25
Romance nations, religion of the
134
INDEX
335
Rome, Freethought Congress at,
316
Boux, Professor, 249
Russia, travels in, 259
Scandinavia, visit to, 257
Schiller, 42, 43
Schleiden, M. J., 47
Schleiermacher, 27-8
Schmidt, Dr., 307
School-days at Merseburg, 34
Schopenhauer on Darwinism, 132
Schwann, Theodor, 65
Scientific method, variations of, 48
Scilla bifolia, search for the, 51
Scotland, visit to, 257, 259
Sea-urchin, fertilisation of the, 257
Seebeck refuses Haeckel's resigna-
tion, 254
Semon, 43
Sergi, Professor, 319
Sethe, Anna, 81, 100
, Bertha, 26
, Christian, 21, 22
, Christoph, 21, 25
Siphonophores, the, 246
Social Democrats, the, 285, 301
Soul, unity of the, 161
Spain, Haeckel's visit to, 252
Specialism in science, 48
Species, early difficulties about,
37-8
idea of fixity of, 105
Sponge, nature of a, 271
Sponges, Haeckel's study of the,
270
Spontaneous generation, Haeckel's
early opposition to, 77
Spontaneous generation, possibility
of, 136
Stereometric structures, 215
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 307
Stettin, Congress of, 145
Stocks, animal, 211
Strauss, 83
Struggle for life, the, 119
Studies of the GastrcBa-theory, the,
277
Sumatra, Haeckel in, 260
Superstition in Italy, 315
System of tlie Medusa, the, 287
System of the Siphonoplwrce, the,
249
Systematic Phytogeny, the, 291
Tadpole, the, 220
Teeth in young parrots, 223
Teneriffe, 240
Terminology created by Haeckel,
36
Theological critics of Haeckel, 298,
305
Theology, Haeckel's rejection of,
75-6
Tiara, 176
Tierra del Fuego, 103
Tissues of the Craw-fish, the, 77
Tjibodas, 260
Training, early, of Haeckel, 32
Transformism, 111
Translations of Haeckel's works,
294
" Travel Pictures," 84
Travels of Haeckel, 256
Tree-frog, the, 119
Unicellular animals, 94, 98
Unity of nature, the, 235
Unnucleated organisms, 180
Utrecht Society of Art and
Science, 248
Venus of Milo, the, 191
Vienna, medical studies at, 80
336
INDEX
Villefranche, fishing at, 76
Virchow, Budolf, 56, 72
at Stettin, 153-171
,, Haeckel's conflict with,
74
,, on the evolution of man,
311
Visit to Ceylon, the, 259
Vital force, the, 135
Vogt, 83, 154
Volger, Otto, 167
W
Wallace, A. E., and Darwin, 123
Weimar, Grand Duke of, 254
Wonders of Life, the, 292, 313
Works, number of Haeckel's, 299
Worm, evolution of the, 276
Wiirtzburg, Haeckel at, 54
,, , invitation to the Uni-
versity of, 253
Zipangu, 20
Zoological Institute, the, 42
,, philosophy, 194
Station at Naples, 59
Zoology, reconstruction of, by
Haeckel, 24
,, , the old and the new, 60
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