Darwin- Wallace Celebration. 23 



Since then many decades have gone by, and yet those 

 impressions of my youth live on in my memory, as vivid 

 as on the first day ; for they have decided the course and 

 object of my life's work. I turn back to them with longing, 

 with that self-same longing which Goethe so powerfully 

 expressed in his Introduction to Faust, where he recalls 

 the time of joyous growth when every bud a marvel 

 promised : 



" . . . . that time of pleasures 

 "While yet in joyous growth I sang 

 When, like a fount, the crowding measures 

 Uninterrupted gushed and sprang ! 

 The bright mist veiled the world before me, 

 In opening buds a marvel woke, 

 As I the thousand blossoms broke, 

 Which every valley richly bore me ! " 



(Bayard Taylor s translation.) 



The seed I received at Jena sprang up early. I took the 

 path of phylogenetic speculation and have pursued it 

 faithfully. 



The amount of experience which Charles Darwin had 

 gathered during his voyage round the world, the widely 

 spread knowledge which his critical mind was able to sort 

 and combine towards large views, the deep comprehension 

 with which he penetrated the history of former ages, that 

 was the soil on which grew his gigantic work, ' On the 

 Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.' With the 

 indefatigable labour of acute sagacity, he was able to draw 

 the substance of his proofs even from the remotest sources : 

 out of works which had received until then no scientific 

 utilisation, out of periodicals consulted only by practical 

 animal and plant breeders. 



As a matter of course, the sum of knowledge existing 

 at the time drew final limits even to the genius of a Darwin. 

 New facts have been added since then, by which his theories 

 are completed, amplified, also corrected. But however far 



