THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 215 



just detects as the lowest stratum. Hence 

 Haeckel calls this section the " promorphology " 

 of organisms. 



It is true that this section, which essays to 

 compress all living things into a very simple 

 scheme, is the hardest to read in the whole work. 

 A number of strange and difficult words have to 

 be invented for this stereometric scheme to which 

 he would reduce the animal and plant forms. 

 Haeckel himself declared, twenty years afterwards 

 (in the second part of the Monograph on the Badio- 

 laria), that this stereometry of organic forms had 

 found little favour in biology *' especially on 

 account of the difficult and complicated nomen- 

 clature." But he had complete confidence as to 

 the substance of it, even after so great a lapse of 

 time. 



In point of fact we have here, it seems to me, 

 a gigantic preparatory work, not so much for the 

 strict purpose of classification, as for a real 

 philosophy of botany and zoology that will be 

 founded some day. This recurrence of sharp 

 stereometric structures, not only in the crystal, 

 but also, if less clearly, in the biological world, 

 will one day prove an important source of know- 

 ledge, in a sense that is not even clear in 

 Haeckel himself. 



We are already entering upon a period that 

 has a glimpse of the truth that the deepest power 

 of Beethoven's music, or Goethe's poetry, or 

 Raphael's painting, or Michael Angelo's sculpture 

 is a mysterious revelation of the most subtle mathe- 



