122 HAECKEL 



ability of a natural origin of species by the modifica- 

 tion of older foims, which were driven ceaselessly 

 to new adaptations under the stress of the struggle 

 for life, to such a pitch that the older possibility 

 of a creation of each species and its deliberate 

 adaptation by supernatural action sank lower and 

 lower. It was a pure conflict of ideas ; the greater 

 overcame the smaller — now smaller. 



Darwin's work, the Origin of Species^ was pub- 

 lished on November 24, 1859, after twenty-five 

 years of study. He kept the theory of selection 

 to himself for more than twenty years. The 

 whole of the young generation from the beginning 

 of the thirties, to which Haeckel belonged, grew 

 up without any suspicion of it. Apart from the 

 constant ill-health that hindered his work, Darwin 

 was tortured with anxiety lest he should be treated 

 as an imaginative dilettante with his heretical 

 ideas. In the scientific circles of the middle of the 

 century one was apt to be disdainfully put down 

 as a windy "natural philosopher" if one spoke 

 of " the evolution of animal and plant species " 

 and the like. The word had become the scare- 

 crow of the exact, professional scientific workers ; 

 much as when commercial men exclaim, '' Dear 

 me, the man's a poet." Hence Darwin wanted 

 to provide a most solid foundation of research for 

 his work, and then to smuggle it into the house 

 like a goblin in a jar. 



He took his task so seriously that, as Lyell 

 afterwards wrote to him, he might have worked 

 on until his hundredth year without ever being 



