DARWIN 127 



God had been excluded. How could he learn any- 

 thing from revelation ? The biblical writers had 

 clearly only made conjectures. Some of them — 

 with regard to Adam, for instance — were certainly 

 incorrect. There was nothing in the Bible about 

 evolution by means of selection. Indeed, was not 

 the whole picture of a creating Deity an error ? 

 These thoughts were bound to press upon the 

 religious mind with all their logical force. When 

 they did so, the very foundations of theology 

 became insecure, to a far more serious extent than 

 Darwin's moderate conclusion suggested. When 

 the book fell on this contentious ground, it was 

 bound, even if it were only read in the last two 

 pages, to provoke vast waves of hostility against 

 its heretical zoology and botany, especially in 

 England. 



• • • • • 



Haeckel was in Italy when the work — the work 

 of his life, too, as the sequel shows — was published. 

 We have seen where he was : in sight of the blue 

 sea, penetrating for the first time into a special 

 section of zoology, the radiolaria, and making 

 it his own. He was far from theorising, for the 

 first years of reality were upon him. He returned 

 to Berlin at the beginning of May, 1860, bringing 

 his study of the radiolaria, and resolved to publish 

 it in comprehensive form. Here he learned for 

 the first time that a "mad" work by Darwin 

 had appeared, that denied the venerable Linnean 

 dogma of the immutability of species. 



German official science was now invaded from 



