io8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



SKETCH OF PROFESSOR HAECKEL. 



ERNST HEINRICH HAECKEL, Professor of Natural History in 

 the University of Jena, and one of the most eminent of German 

 biologists, was born at Potsdam, in Prussia, on the 16th of February, 

 1834, and is consequently now but forty years of age. In his child- 

 hood he was very fond of botany. He studied medicine and the natu- 

 ral sciences at Berlin and Wurzburg, and graduated as doctor of 

 medicine in Berlin in 1857. In Wurzburg he studied anatomy and 

 histology under Kollikcr and Leydig, and in Berlin under Johannes 

 Mtiller. He became the assistant of the eminent pathologist Virchow, 

 and commenced medical practice in Berlin in 1858. He had made 

 scientific excursions to the Mediterranean in 1854 and 1856 with Kol- 

 liker and Mtiller; and in 1859-'60 a fifteen months' residence in Italy, 

 which he employed in zoological researches, became the turning-point 

 in his career, and he withdrew from the practice of medicine, and be- 

 came a professed zoologist. He went to Jena in 1861, and was made 

 professor extraordinary in the university in 1862. In 1865 the uni- 

 versity created a regular chair of zoology specially for him, and he 

 began the formation there of a valuable museum. From that time his 

 lectures, together with those of Gegenbaur on comparative anatomy, 

 have given great reputation to the Jena school. Prof. Haeckel is said 

 to have declined very advantageous appointments to other universities 

 mainly because he would not be separated from his friend Gegenbaur. 

 Prof. Haeckel early accepted the views of Mr. Darwin, and has be- 

 come their leading expositor in Germany. He has, besides, greatly 

 extended and strengthened the theory of organic development by his 

 own researches. His biographer in the American Cyclopaedia states 

 that in 1863 " Darwinism " was generally looked upon with great dis- 

 favor in German scientific circles ; and when, on September 19th of 

 that year, Prof. Haeckel appeared before the convention of German 

 physicians and naturalists held in Stettin, as the enthusiastic advocate 

 of development doctrines, he stood almost alone, and thenceforth he 

 determined to devote his life to their extension, establishment, and 

 promulgation. 



In 1866 he completed a work on the general morphology of organ- 

 isms, in two volumes, which ranks as one of the landmarks of the sci- 

 ence. In that work he propounded, as a fundamental biological law, 

 " that the individual development of every organism, or the series 

 of forms through which it passes from germ to complete form, repeats 

 approximately the development of its race, or- the series of forms 

 through which its ancestors have passed. Moreover, all organic be- 

 ings, hitherto, had been classified into the two kingdoms, animal and 

 vegetable ; but a number of creatures were found to present in exter- 



