12 INTRODUCTION 



The time seems to have come in England for 

 the publication of some authoritative picture of 

 the great biologist and controversialist. One work 

 of his circulates by the hundred thousand amongst 

 us, and has had a deep and lasting influence on 

 the thoughts of large classes of men. His in- 

 fluence is hardly less in France and Italy, as well 

 as in Grermany ; his doctrines have, in fact, been 

 translated into fifteen different tongues. The 

 deep, sometimes bitter, controversy that they have 

 engendered must have led to a desire to know more 

 of the man and his making. The attempts that 

 have been made here and there to ''construct" 

 him from his ideas and literary manner are, as the 

 reader will see, very far removed from the reality. 

 Behind all the strained inferences from doctrines, 

 behind all the dishonouring epithets, there is a 

 genial, warm, deeply artistic, intensely ideaUst 

 nature, sung with enthusiasm by poets who have 

 known him. Once, in playful scientific mood, 

 Haeckel tried to explain his own character in his 

 familiar terms of heredity and environment. He 

 came of a line of lawyers, straight, orderly, inexor- 

 able men. He had lived and worked in quiet Jena, 

 in the beautiful valley of the Saale. But he did 

 not speak of that larger environment — ^the field of 

 battle, stretching far away, beyond the calm Thu- 

 ringian hills, to the ends of Europe. We must 

 place Haeckel's ardent and high-minded nature in 

 that field, face to face with his opponents, if we 

 would understand him. 



For the supplementary chapter I have drawn 



