444 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 
phosis from a physician to a zoologist, and as far as philosophical 
views of nature were concerned I was a blank sheet of paper, a 
tabula rasa. I read the book first in 1861, at a single sitting and 
with ever-growing enthusiasm. When I had finished it I stood firm 
on the basis of the evolution theory, and I have never seen reason 
to forsake it. 
This must have been the case with many. You know that the 
generation at the beginning of the century, satiated with speculation, 
threw itself wholly into detailed research, and its whole endeavor 
was to acquire new facts. Darwin furnished the unifying idea for 
these: it was evolution. Almost the whole younger generation of 
naturalists ranged themselves at once on his side; the older genera- 
tion gradually followed, first zoologists, then botanists; even my 
excellent friend, Anton de Bary, was only converted to the new 
views in 1880, and from that time onward there was little further 
opposition, even on the part of the botanists. 
_ Although Darwin’s book was straightforward and simple, its effect 
was nothing less than revolutionary; it upset the old deep-rooted 
doctrine of creation just as completely as Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, 
and Oken had desired. The book raised a conflagration like 
lhghtning in a full barn. This was soon so widespread that people 
read only “against ” or “ for” Darwin, especially in Germany, but 
later also in England. At first the opponents had the upper hand; 
the church regarded the new doctrine as dangerous to religion, 
because the old Mosaic mythos of creation could no longer be re- 
garded as the basis of belief, and many of the older naturalists did 
not care to give up their inherited opinions without a struggle, and 
therefore strove to depreciate the new theory, either by serious 
argument or by satire and ridicule. The first to publish a work 
“for” Darwin was the German naturalist, Fritz Miiller (1864), in 
Brazil. His book contained the first important deduction from the 
Darwinian theory; it went further than Darwin himself, and con- 
tained the germ of what Ernst Haeckel called, in his suggestive 
“ Generelle Morphologie ” (1866), the “ fundamental biogenetic law.” 
I myself was probably the third champion of Darwin’s views when, 
in 1867, I delivered my academic inaugural address on “The Justi- 
fication of the Darwinian Theory.” 
At that period almost every special study in the domain of 
embryology and “ comparative anatomy ” revealed fresh facts which 
were only intelligible on the assumption that the theory of descent 
was valid; much was now observed that had formerly been over- 
looked, simply because it was not understood, and much of the work 
done in the period of detailed investigation had to be done over 
again, because the points that were now most important had pre- 
