Haeckel

When Professor Bölsche closed his biographical 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 earlier chapters that the most dignified and disdainful 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?”^[9]

In an earlier chapter Professor Bölsche tells the moving story of the writing of the General Morphology: 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 parallel to this in Haeckel’s attitude at the time when Bölsche 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 world that was, he thought, sinking into reaction. This time he appealed to the people. The five years that have followed have witnessed an extraordinary 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 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 perspective. 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 Bölsche 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 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 boycott 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 absolutely 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 Hertwig, 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.” Two lists in it catch the eye. One is a list of Haeckel’s 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 research; most are beautifully illustrated by himself. The second list gives the names of those who have contributed towards the marble bust by Professor Kopf, of Rome. 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.

The story so vividly unfolded by Professor Bölsche 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 intellectual labour with which the various phenomena are connected and the gigantic mass of material is reduced to order.” The Royal 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 “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 Haeckel’s 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 consequent alliance of Conservative Kaiserism with the still powerful Catholic Church. Haeckel distrusted the power of Demos much as Renan 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 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 Phylogeny, and translate 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.

So he wrote a vigorous, an irritating, an awakening 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 Riddle 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 untranslated 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 foundations 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 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 withdrawing 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 metaphysicians, 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 commentary 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 “naïve 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 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 consciousness and his disdain of all study of mind that was not grounded on evolution. To-day Gramzow writes: “The criticism which he makes of Kant’s theory of knowledge from the evolutionary point of view is the greatest advance that philosophy has made in that branch since Kant’s time.”

The most violent critics of the Riddle 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 alienating 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 ecclesiastical 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 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 Bölsche, 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 controversy 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. It has sold, with rather less than the usual advertising, 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 thule.^[10]

From the seething agitation he had aroused Professor Haeckel cheerfully withdrew in the autumn of 1900 to make his long journey to Java. He now lived under the public eye, and amusing constructions were put on his movements. American 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-human, 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 Ritter 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 Verestchagin, who was returning on the boat from China), and material for the inevitable book. Aus Insulinde is a charming and finely illustrated work of travel, but has not been translated.

Before he left Jena he had, with his characteristic urbanity and diligence, given personal replies to about a thousand letters he had received apropos of his Riddle of the Universe. The epistolary 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 prepared 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 enthusiastic 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 Anthropogeny, of which Professor Bölsche 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. Selenka had published wonderful studies of the anthropoid apes. Friedenthal 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 command. 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 on some of Haeckel’s references to fellow-anthropologists 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 Rabl 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 complete proof of its thesis—a proof accepted by every prominent biologist in England and by many prelates (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 appeals with equal force to the æsthete 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 Riddle 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-sacrificing 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 “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 explaining “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 to his beloved Italy. There was another reason for his flight. His seventieth birthday was approaching. He had declared at the banquet given in his honour on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, 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 Riviera 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 Rapallo, and at once commenced his favourite fishing for the tiny inhabitants 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 knowledge, with excursions into psychology, suicide, 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 “notoriously licentious life” (the words of the Glasgow preacher were spoken at this very period), approached his eighth decade of life—of work.

He remained at Rapallo until the birthday had passed, but his address had meantime become widely known, and the miniature postal arrangements at Rapallo were severely taxed. Letters, telegrams, flowers, and other gifts—mostly spontaneous 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 distinguished worker, and little festive commemorations were held at many of the universities. At Zurich, Professor Conrad Keller and Professor 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 correspondence that continually reaches Haeckel, one is disposed to repeat of him the phrase applied to a great heretical teacher of the Middle Ages, Peter Abélard: “Never was man so loved—and so hated.”

A feature of the commemoration that peculiarly gratified him was the special festive number of the German students’ lively periodical, Jugend, published 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—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 Rapallo, 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 Riddle. 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 Bölsche 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 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 ‘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, archæology, 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 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 Rome. 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 Romano, and to send its Minister of Public Instruction to open the Congress. Veteran warriors such as Haeckel, Berthelot, Salmeron, Sergi, Denis, and Björnsen, 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 Rome, and Rome—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 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 Björnsen, 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 has been unable to eliminate its unpleasant consequences. But the opportunity of enforcing his gospel in the capital of the Empire, where the Virchows and Du Bois-Reymonds 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 handbills 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 Germany 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 schön,” he still repeats. What will men say of 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 sacrifice, 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.”