NATURAL SCIENCE: 



A Monthly Review of Scientific Progress. 



No. 25. Vol. IV. MARCH, 1894. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 



Haeckel. 

 " It gives furiously to think," as the Saturday Review dehghts to 

 put it, that Ernst Haeckel was born only sixty years ago ; for those 

 of us whose scientific education dates within the last two decades have 

 been accustomed to regard him as a necessary pillar of the world of 

 thought. Morphology, promorphology, the categories of individuality, 

 the gastraea theory, the comparisons of vertebrate embryos, the 

 natural history of creation, and the blundering incapacity of those 

 who doubted it, were no small part of the intellectual pabulum of our 

 scientific youth. We learned from him that the animal kingdom was 

 a set of pieces to be arranged in orderly procession from Protista to 

 Man ; that to study the embryology of an animal was to unwrap an 

 Indian puzzle-box, piece within piece, and each piece suggesting the 

 animal next behind in the procession of all the animals. We learned 

 from him to invent logically hypothetical ancestors, and to find living 

 animals to tally with them. It was all so cogent and so stimulating, 

 and now, with fuller knowledge, so easy to jeer at and discredit. No 

 one goes now to Naples to discover in the development of an animal 

 exactly what he knows should be there : even a new discovery of the 

 ancestor of all the vertebrates is somewhat blown upon. We 

 elaborate methods, work out details, and mutter sadly : — 

 " Embryologists we, 

 But we haven't got everything down in the sea." 



It is a history common to all great ideas. They explain so much 

 at first, open so many new vistas, lead to advances so great that they 

 seem master-keys to all the secrets of nature. And then a time 

 comes when the potent explanation becomes impotent ; a time when 

 one set of men seeing only how much it has explained, distort things 

 it cannot explain into formal harmony, while another set, seeing only 

 what it cannot explain, attempt to discredit it altogether. The cell 

 theory and the recapitulation theory are now in this condition, and 

 Haeckel, partly because of the intimate connection of so much of his 



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