310 HAECKEL 



Selenka had published wonderful studies of the 

 anthropoid apes. Friendenthal and others had 

 shown the literal blood-relationship of the higher 

 apes and man by a series of beautiful experiments. 

 He must once more gather together the enormous 

 mass of facts, and marshal them with his old com- 

 mand. For six months he worked incessantly on 

 the new edition. A hundred pages of matter were 

 added to it, a hundred fresh illustrations. Great 

 and exacting as the task would have been for a 

 younger man, the w^ork appeared in 1903 in a 

 form that silenced criticism. I need only quote a 

 sentence from the notice of it that was published 

 in the Daily Telegraph by one of our leading 

 literary critics, when it was issued in this country. 

 "It is a grand conception, this of the great 

 physiologist, that every man, in the brief term of 

 his prenatal development, should go through these 

 successive changes, by which man has, in countless 

 ages, been evolved from the primitive germ- 

 cell ; and it is triumphantly vindicated in The 

 Evolution of Man. It is impossible to do justice 

 in words to the patience, the labour, the specialised 

 skill and industry involved in the preparation 

 of this monumental work." And one has only 

 to compare this latest edition with the previous 

 one to see at a glance the complete transformation, 

 and realise the freshness and force of mind of the 

 aged biologist. 



In the face of such a work, with its towering 

 structure of proof from embryology, comparative 

 anatomy, and paleontology, one must look leniently 



