HAECKEL AND THE NEW ZOOLOGY 



of progress in human thought in all the world. Jena 

 is Jena to-day not so much because Guericke and 

 Fichte and Hegel and Schiller and Oken taught here in 

 the past, as because it has for thirty-eight years been 

 the seat of the labors of Germany's greatest naturalist, 

 one of the most philosophical zoologists of any country 

 or any age, Professor Ernst Haeckel. It is of Professor 

 Haeckel and his work that I chiefly mean to write, and 

 if I have dwelt somewhat upon Jena itself, it is be- 

 cause this quaint, retired village has been the theatre 

 of Haeckel' s activities all the mature years of his life, 

 and because the work he has here accomplished could 

 hardly have been done so well elsewhere; some of it, 

 for reasons I shall presently mention, could hardly 

 have been done elsewhere at all at least in another 

 university. 



It was in 1 86 1 that young Dr. Haeckel came first to 

 Jena as a teacher. He had made a tentative effort at 

 the practice of medicine in Berlin, then very gladly had 

 turned from a distasteful pursuit to the field of pure 

 science. His first love, before he took up the study of 

 medicine, had been botany, though pictorial art, then 

 as later, competed with science for his favorable atten- 

 tion. But the influence of his great teacher, Johannes 

 Miiller, together with his medical studies, had turned 

 his attention more directly to the animal rather than 

 vegetable life, and when he left medicine it was to turn 

 explicitly to zoology as a life study. Here he believed 

 he should find a wider field than in art, which he loved 

 almost as well, and which, it may be added, he has 

 followed all his life as a dilettante of much more than 

 amateurish skill. Had he so elected, Haeckel might 



