Haeckel : 
His Life, Work, and Companions. 
BY H. B. WITTON, SR. 
Read before the Hamilton Association May 14th, 1909. 
'RNST HEINRICH HAECKEL was born at Pots- 
kK dam, in the province of Brandenburg, Prussia, 
February the 16th, 1824. His birthplace is notable 
for its royal palace and souvenirs of Frederick the Great. 
From his youth up his motto was: ‘‘ Each minute has its 
value ; plav or work, but do something.’’ His life was in 
keeping with his motto. In youth he became a good Greek 
and Latin scholar; an acquirement he found serviceable 
when he had to coin naines for more than three thousand 
new species. In token of his learning, and as reward for 
service, during a long life devoted to science, Haeckel has 
had conferred on him many medals, degrees and diplomas. 
Of the latter he has received nearly a hundred from colleges 
and universities of renown. ; 
Haeckel has always deemed himself a child of the 
nineteenth century. In that opinion he can hardly be 
gainsayed, for perhaps no man ever lived in closersympathy 
with the advanced spirit of hisage. Thescience of zoology, 
to which his life has been devoted, in the times im- 
mediately preceding our own, stamped on the thoughts and 
opinions of men an ineffaceable impress. In the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries the new light thrown on the 
world of inorganic matter was hardly more marvellous than 
was that in the nineteenth century shed on the world of 
organic life. The doctrine of Copernicus, confirmed a 
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