DISCUSSION 187 



X. DR. SCHMIDT-JENA S SPEECH. 



The speaker introduced himself to his audience as 

 having been for many years Professor Ernst HaeckeVs 

 assistant at Jena, and as now being the General 

 Secretary of the German Monistic Association ; 

 he thought he had therefore an excuse for making 

 a few remarks upon Father Wasmann s lectures. 

 In the first place he wished to say a few words on 

 Haeckel s views. There were three chief points 

 which he wished to emphasise: Firstly, he chal 

 lenged Wasmann s assertion that Haeckel had for 

 forty years consistently confused the doctrine of evolu 

 tion with Darwinism or the theory of selection. This 

 statement was, according to Dr. Schmidt-Jena, 

 absolutely false, and the contrary was the truth. 



In my closing address I showed that Haeckel, 

 as a popular speaker and writer, often expressed 

 himself quite otherwise than he has done in 

 his more important works, where he speaks as 

 a specialist in zoology. I may add here some 

 further proofs of what I have just said. Com 

 pare, for instance, the lecture delivered at 

 Eisenach on the View of Nature taken by 

 Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck (Jena, 1882), 

 in which no one could fail to perceive that 

 he identifies Darwinism with the doctrine of 

 evolution, and does so for a specific purpose. 



