Frof. Ernst Haeckel. 25 



To this achievement he determined to deyote himself as his 

 lifework. Wonderful has been his success, because he has 

 brought to bear upon it a rare genius sustained by a phe- 

 nomenal industry 



In order to gather some notion of what is meant by " phe- 

 nomenal industry," we need but to glance over his works 

 and explorations for a few years. 



In 1862 he presented to his university a celebrated work 

 on the Eadialaria, for which a gold medal was awarded. 

 In this work new genera and species were described and the 

 whole subject newly classified in accordance with the new 

 philosophy of the genealogical descent of organisms, by which 

 he justified his adhesion to the new and then unpopular 

 Darwinian doctrine of the origin of species. 



In 1803, before the Convention of German Physicians at 

 Stettin, he introduced and stood almost alone in advocating 

 the new views and discoveries of Darwinism as the solving 

 and renovating power in the biological sciences, and as 

 tributary to medicine. 



In 1864 he published in illustration of the descent of 

 species, an important work on the Crustacea. 



In 1865 appeared another work on the Medusce. The 

 result of these publications and of his teaching was such 

 that the University of Jena began to be recognized as 

 the unrivaled school of zoology, comparative anatomy, and 

 Biology. A regular professorship was created for him. A 

 museum was established with a lecture hall, and his fi'iend 

 and co-worker. Prof. Gegenbaur, was appointed his as- 

 sistant. 



The next year (1866) the first of his larger works ap- 

 peared. The Organic Morphology, in two large volumes, 

 with hundreds of charts and illustrations, which astonished 

 the proverbially patient and industrious Germans by their ex- 

 tent, thoroughness, novelty, and general importance. Their 

 main purpose was to prove that the whole domain of com- 

 parative physiology, anatomy, and embryology was scien- 

 tifically reduced to successive order by the new views, which 

 made correlative changes and functions the solution of the 

 forms of all living organisms. By this law of evolution he 

 proved that the changes in the development of the embryo 

 epitomize the successive changes which the genus to which 

 the animal belongs has undergone in its world-history. This 

 law of comparative embryology at once gave to biologists an 

 immense power of prevision and discovery; for the tribal 



