106 HAECKEL 



gether and separating the unlike." So God spake 

 to Adam when he stood before him, naked as a 

 Fuegian. Linne comes on the scene some six 

 thousand years afterwards to set about this naming 

 and arranging in earnest. But that does not make 

 much difference. There are the species created by 

 God. They have ceaselessly reproduced them- 

 selves since the days of Paradise according to the 

 command to increase and multiply, each one in its 

 own kind, so that the polar bear has only begotten 

 polar bears, the giraffe giraffes, the hippopotamus 

 hippopotami. Thus, in spite of death, the primitive 

 Paradise is still there, and Linne, the official pro- 

 fessor at Upsala, with his venerable wig and 

 embroidered coat, can take up the work of the 

 naked Adam with a good conscience, and finish 

 what the patriarch had not been able to do. 



Linn6 died in 1778 (about the time when Goethe 

 was beginning the Iphigenia and Wilhelm Meister) 

 in the full fame of all these achievements and all 

 his hypotheses from the giraffe to God. Fifty 

 years elapsed between this and Darwin's voyage ; 

 but in those fifty years the following process is 

 accomplished : 



An increasing number of bones and other relics 

 of animal species, that exist no longer, were dug 

 out of the earth. In South America the skeleton 

 was found of a giant-sloth, the megatherium, the 

 remains of a kind of animal, larger than the 

 elephant, that no traveller could find living in the 

 country. The famous mammoth-corpse came to 

 light in the ice of Siberia; an entirely strange 



