DARWIN 139 



organ to individual, in connection with the social 

 species of radiolaria that live in communities. It 

 is a subject that Haeckel took up with great 

 vigour later on, as we shall see. Here it affords 

 him an opportunity to say a word about the 

 general fusion of things in the world of life, in 

 opposition to our rigid divisions in classification. 

 Organ and individual pass into each other without 

 any fixed limit. That, he says, is only a repetition 

 of the relation of the plant to the animal. We 

 cannot establish any fixed limitations between 

 them. What we set up as such are only man's 

 abstractions. In nature itself we never find these 

 subjective abstract ideas of limitation " incor- 

 porated purely, but always fading away in gradual 

 transitions ; here, again, the scale of organisation 

 rises gradually from the simplest to the most 

 complex, in a continuous development." How- 

 ever, these are words that might have been written 

 by Schleiden or Unger or Bronn before Darwin's 

 time. 



Yet there is something in the work that would 

 have been a jet of ice-cold water to the Agassizs 

 and G-iebels. This brilliant new " Extraordinary 

 Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoo- 

 logical Museum at Jena University," as it says 

 on the title-page, accepts Darwin in a certain 

 unambiguous passage late in the text. 



It is necessary to bring to light once more 

 this passage, buried in a work that is not easily 

 accessible, an expensive technical work separated 

 from us by four decades now. It is worth doing 



