34 HAECKEL 



In the long run we may say of all education as 

 of the physician in the old saying, '^ The best doctor 

 is the one we don't need, because we are not 

 ill." Haeckel was sent to the school at Merseburg. 

 This instruction came to a close in his eighteenth 

 year. He thought of some of his old teachers 

 with affection forty years afterwards. On the 

 whole his later opinion of the usual schooling was as 

 severe as that of many of his contemporaries. In 

 his General Morphology (1866), his most profound 

 work, he speaks of the ^'very defective, perverse, 

 and often really mischievous instruction, by which 

 we are filled with absurd errors, instead of natural 

 truths, in our most impressionable years." Sixteen 

 years afterwards (in a speech delivered at Eisenach) 

 he hopes that the triumphant science of evolution 

 " will put an end to one of the greatest evils in our 

 present system of education — that overloading of 

 the memory with dead material that destroys the 

 finest powers, and prevents the normal develop- 

 ment of either mind or body." " This overload- 

 ing," he says, '^is due to the old and ineradicable 

 error that the excellence of education is to be 

 judged by the quantity of positive facts committed 

 to memory, instead of by the quality of the real 

 knowledge imparted. Hence it is especially advis- 

 able to make a more careful selection of the matter 

 of instruction both in the higher and the elemen- 

 tary schools, and not to give precedence to the 

 faculties that burden the memory with masses of 

 dead facts, but to those that buildup the judgment 

 with the living play of the idea of evolution. Let 



