234 HAECKEL 



It was a vast work. A single man had at first 

 the whole kingdom in his hands, had to reject the 

 old lines of demarcation and create new ones. 

 There was a certain advantage at the time. Since 

 Cuvier's time an immense quantity of new dis- 

 coveries had accumulated for the construction of a 

 system of living things. Miiller, Siebold, Leuckart, 

 Vogt, and many others, had done a great deal 

 of preparatory work. All this was of great assis- 

 tance to the man who now came forward with 

 courage and a talent for organisation. Never- 

 theless it needed real genius, together with almost 

 boundless knowledge, to accomplish the task. We 

 must remember how reactionary (even apart from 

 the question of evolution) was the systematic work 

 of distinguished and assuredly learned zoologists 

 like GKebel at that time ; they worked on in a 

 humdrum way as if the more advanced students 

 did not exist. How different it has all become 

 since Haeckel's thorough reform of classification ! 

 We are astounded to-day at the skill with which he 

 drew lines in his very first sketch that were so 

 near to the permanent truth. I need only point 

 to the new scheme of the classification of the 

 vertebrates. A good deal of his work was, of 

 course, bound to be defective, because the facts 

 were not yet known; for instance, in fixing the 

 point at which the vertebrates may have evolved 

 from the invertebrates. It was not until a year 

 later that the discovery of the embryonic develop- 

 ment of the ascidia by Kowalewsky threw light on 

 this. Again, there was the solution of the problem 



