158 HAECKEL 



&c. Haeckel himself, by the way, was still 

 convinced — in his essay On the Generation of 

 Waves in Living F articles — two years before the 

 schismatic Council of 1877 that Virchow had had 

 a decisive influence on his own Darwinian career. 

 ** If I have contributed anything myself in an 

 elementary way to the building-up of the idea of 

 evolution, I owe it for the most part to the cellular- 

 biological views with which Virchow's teaching 

 penetrated me twenty years ago." *' As Herr 

 Haeckel supposes," was the cool repayment of 

 this sincere expression of gratitude. However, 

 that is another matter. Let us return to Stettin. 

 We read, where **my friend Haeckel" comes in, 

 that he has shown how scientific research (the 

 pure investigation of facts without the least 

 tincture of philosophy) has gone on to deal with 

 ^* the great question of the creation of man." It 

 is merely conceded that there are still certain 

 small outstanding difiiculties, as, for instance, at 

 the root of the genealogical tree. According to 

 Darwin it is conceivable that there were four or 

 five primitive forms of life. Haeckel is inclined 

 to restrict them to a single stem-cell. It seems 

 to him (Yirchow) that there may have been a 

 number of different beginnings of life. We have 

 here the opening of the controversy as to the 

 monophyletic (from one root only) or polyphyletic 

 (from several roots) development of life, which is 

 still unsettled as far as the commencement of life 

 is concerned, but a very secondary question. It 

 would be well if there had never been any more 



