DISCUSSION 191 



In spite of this statement, the truth remains 

 that, in virtue of his double character, Haeckel 

 often made very different assertions in his 

 popular works from those in his scientific 

 writings. Cf. the striking passage, quoted in 

 my closing address, on the subject of Haeckel's 

 pedigree of primates (apes and men). 



On the same subject Haeckel says in his 

 Weltratsel, p. 99 : ' In the last twenty years a 

 considerable number of well-preserved fossil 

 skeletons of anthropoid and other apes have 

 been discovered, and amongst them are all the 

 important intermediate forms, which constitute a 

 series of ancestors connecting the oldest anthro- 

 poid ape with man.' If any one can regard a 

 statement of this kind as a modest hypothesis, 

 and not as an apodictical, dogmatic assertion 

 involving the constitution of pedigrees, that 

 person must have a very peculiar idea of what 

 an hypothesis is. 



The third point to which the speaker referred was 

 the biogenetic principle. He said that Father 

 Wasmann had stated this law the fundamental 

 law of organic evolution as Haeckel called it, in 

 the following way : ' Ontogenesis, or the evolution 

 of the individual, is the repetition in brief of the 

 phylogenesis, or the evolution of the race.' He 

 had asserted, moreover, that according to this law 

 the ontogenesis must reproduce the phylogenesis 

 in detail. 



