M Off ISM AND EVOLUTION. 245 



presenting facts, and to his adroitness in drawing the 

 conclusions which suit him, whether such conclusions 

 are warranted by the facts or not. With Haeckel, 

 especially when treating of his favorite topics, Evo- 

 lution and Monism, the wish is always father to the 

 thought, and he has a way of convincing his readers 

 that he is right, even when they have reason to suspect, 

 if they are not certain, that he is positively wrong. 



One of the chief reasons for Haeckel's success as 

 a theorist, is to be found in the fact that he is an ex- 

 pert in verbal jugglery, and a consummate master in 

 the art of sophistry. Whether his use of sophism is in- 

 tentional or not, is not for me to say. It does, how- 

 ever, seem almost incredible, that anyone endowed 

 with ordinary reasoning powers could unconsciously 

 fall into so great, and so frequent, errors of logic, as 

 may be seen on almost every page of Haeckel's evo- 

 lutionary works. He possesses in an eminent de- 

 gree, as has been well said of him, what a French 

 prestidigitator declared to be the leading principle of 

 legerdemain, viz., "the art of making things appear 

 and disappear." This is true. What Robert Houdin 

 is among conjurers, that is Haeckel among what the 

 Germans call the " nature-philosophers " of the pres- 

 ent generation. 



A striking illustration of adroitness in verbal 

 jugglery is given in his genealogy of man. In his 

 genealogical tree Haeckel recognizes twenty-two 

 "form-stages," through which he traces human an- 

 cestry from monad to man, from the beginning of the 

 Laurentian to the Quaternary Period, when homo 

 sapiens first appeared on this planet. 



