DISCUSSION 235 



personalities : he is at once a scientifically accurate 

 student of nature and a bold advocate of Darwinism, 

 dealing freely in generalisations. He has both 

 these personalities ; and not unfrequently he himself 

 mistakes one for the other. In his General Morpho 

 logy, and still more in his later work on Systematic 

 Phytogeny, Haeckel certainly has taken pains to 

 draw a tolerably clear and precise distinction between 

 the theory of evolution and Darwinism. In these 

 works he speaks of the theory of evolution as 

 a construction formed of hypotheses. But he 

 expresses himself in quite another way very often 

 when he is using popular language and addressing 

 the general public. I happen to have by me the 

 oration which he delivered at Cambridge in 1898, 

 before an assembly of zoologists, and subsequently 

 published for the benefit of wider circles. It is 

 entitled : Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of 

 Man (Ueber unsere gegenwartige Kenntnis vom 

 Ur sprung des Menschen), Bonn, 1899. On p. 22 

 is a passage which I propose to read aloud to you, 

 as bearing upon the charge brought against me of 

 having misunderstood Haeckel s pedigrees, whereas 

 Haeckel had no intention of bringing them forward 

 as dogmatically correct, but merely as modest 

 hypotheses. Haeckel asserts the contrary with 

 reference to his Pedigree of the Primates, which 

 he gives here on p. 35, and which I criticised in my 

 third lecture. 



On p. 22 we read : The general outlines of the 



