72 HAECKEL 



from a well-stocked museum. A whole world lay 

 between these surviving followers of Linne and 

 the splendid school of Johannes Muller. 



However that may be, the fact was that under 

 these alluring attractions HaeckePs studies were 

 drifting from the medical profession to an " impe- 

 cunious art." But as medical work had been 

 chosen, if only as a temporary occupation, 

 Haeckel had to tear himself away from the great 

 magnet, at the Easter of 1855, by removing to 

 a different place. He chose, as the least intoler- 

 able compromise, to return to Wiirtzburg. At all 

 events we find him spending three terms there. 

 I have already said that Rudolf Virchow was one 

 of the distinguished Wiirtzburgers at the time 

 who sought most keenly the solution of the new 

 problems of biology on the medical side. Hence 

 Virchow had to help him to find the bridge 

 between the work he really loved and the work 

 he was obliged to do. As a fact, Virchow directed 

 the whole of his studies on this side in the three 

 terms. 



Virchow was not so fascinating as Johannes 

 Muller, even in his best years. But it was some- 

 thing to be initiated into medical science by such 

 a man. A later generation has, unfortunately, 

 grown accustomed to see mental antipodes in 

 Virchow and Haeckel. In 1877 they had a 

 controversy with regard to the freedom of science 

 that echoed through the whole world of thought. 

 Yet seventeen years afterwards Haeckel himself 

 (who was first attacked by Virchow), looking back 



