PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. XXI 



been gained by the author of this " Ignorahimiis," the most 

 deserving student of the electricity of nerves and muscles, 

 we must here most emphatically protest in the name of 

 advancing natm-al knowledge and of all science capable 

 of development. Had our one-celled Amoeba-ancestors of 

 the Lam-entian Period been told that their descendants 

 would afterwards, in the Cambrian Period, produce a many- 

 celled Worm-like organism possessed of skin and intestine, 

 muscles and nerves, kidneys and blood-vessels, they would 

 certainly not have believed ; nor, again, would these Worms 

 have believed, had they been told that their descendants 

 would develop into skull-less Vertebrates, such as the 

 Amphioxus ; nor would these Skull-less Animals have 

 credited that their posterity would ever become Skulled 

 Animals (Craniota). Our Silurian Primitive-fish ancestors 

 would have been equally hard to convince that their off- 

 spring of the Devonian Period would acquire amphibian 

 form, and yet later, in the Triassic Period, would appear 

 as Mammals ; the latter, again, would have deemed it im- 

 possible that, in Tertiary times, a very late descendant 

 of theirs would acquire human form, and would gather the 

 splendid fruits of the tree of knowledge. All these would 

 have answered : " We shall never change, nor shaU we 

 ever understand the history of our evolution ! Nunquam 

 mutahimur ! Semper ignorahimus ! " 



With this Ignorahimus the Berlin school of Biology 

 tries to stop science in its advance along the paths of 

 evolution. This seemingly humble but really audacious 

 " IgnorahiTnus" is the " Ignoratis" of the infallible 

 Vatican and of the " black international " which it leads ; 

 that mischievous host, against which the modern civilized 



