188 THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 



On page 6 of his Weltratsel (Bonn, 1899), in 

 speaking of the relation in which Darwinism 

 stands to the doctrine of evolution, Haeckel 

 says : It will never be forgotten that the 

 merit of having experimentally laid the founda 

 tion of this highest (!) philosophical conception (of 

 evolution) must be ascribed to the great English 

 scientist Charles Darwin ; in 1859 he estab 

 lished on a firm basis that theory of descent, 

 which the genial French naturalist, Lamarck, 

 recognised in its general outlines as long ago 

 as 1809, etc. It can hardly be maintained 

 that we have in these words a clear distinction 

 between Darwinism and the doctrine of evolu 

 tion. 



Dr. Schmidt-Jena, however, maintained that in 

 his book on General Morphology, written forty 

 years ago, Haeckel had drawn a very sharp distin 

 guishing line between, on the one hand, the theory 

 of evolution in general, and the theory of organic 

 evolution in particular (which he called Lamarckism, 

 after the French zoologist Lamarck, who was its 

 real author) and, on the other hand, Darwin s 

 theory of selection, which he designated Darwinism. 

 If in later years he used the name Darwinism hi a 

 wider sense, he hardly ever forgot to add, by way of 

 explanation, that he meant the whole theory of 

 evolution, and especially that of organic evolution, 

 and where he did not definitely state this, it was 



