CHAPTER VIII 



ERNST HEINRICH HAECKEL : THE EMBRYOGENIC METHOD 



The History of Creation Parallelism of Ontogeny and Phylogeny 

 Stages of the embryonic development Study and criticism of the 

 phylogenical essays of Haeckel Human genealogy The crisis of 

 transformism. 



THE transformist ideas so brilliantly set forth by 

 Charles Darwin were still to remain a long time 

 without echo among the French naturalists, ena- 

 moured, almost without exception, of Cuverian 

 ideas. As a compensation Darwin found imme- 

 diately in England, and still more in Germany, a 

 very favourable scientific public, and even a certain 

 number of passionate adepts. One of the most 

 enthusiastic among these fervent propagators of 

 the Darwinian doctrine was Professor Ernst 

 Haeckel, of the University of lena. In his re- 

 nowned works, Generelle Morphologie, and Natur- 

 liche Schopjungsgeschichte* Haeckel analyses all 

 the consequences of the transformist hypothesis, 

 and, like Darwin, studies them exclusively as a 

 zoologist to whom the domain of palaeontology is 

 closed, or at least very unfamiliar. 



HaeckePs method is essentially an embryogenical 

 or ontogenical one, to use this scholar's neologism. 



* This last has been translated into English and revised by Pro- 

 fessor Ray Lankester as the History of Creation (2 vols. , Kegan Paul 

 and Co., 1899). 



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