226 HAECKEL 



was reserved for Haeckel to develop its full 

 importance. He corrected it in two particulars. 

 Oken and his admirers had made an unfortunate 

 mistake. They believed in a genealogical tree of 

 all living things, but they conceived it on the lines 

 of the old classification. Linne had enumerated 

 in succession : mammals, birds, amphibia, fishes, 

 insects, and worms. He put them in one straight 

 line, which is certainly the best arrangement for 

 general purposes. But when Oken came with the 

 idea of natural evolution, he at once took this 

 series as the outline of a genealogical tree. The 

 mammals descended from the birds ; the fishes 

 from the insects ; and so on. If that were really 

 the case, the highest animals would be expected to 

 reproduce all the animal and plant stages in the 

 course of their embryonic development, on the lines 

 of the theory. The human being would have to 

 be, successively, not only a lizard and a fish, but 

 even a bird, a beetle, a crab, and so on. This was 

 by no means borne out by the facts, and so the 

 theory seemed to be discredited. 



Now let us glance at Haeckel's genealogical 

 tables. We find eight of them, artistically drawn, 

 at the end of the second volume. The " genea- 

 logical tree" is given in the form of a branching 

 tree, or as a huge forest-like growth of stems some 

 of which only meet in the ultimate roots. There 

 is no trace in Haeckel's designs of the sort of 

 Eiffel-Tower arrangement that the Linnean system 

 involved. At the bottom we find the protists, the 

 most primitive forms of life. From this point two 



