ON OUK PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 1 



By Ernst Haeckel. 



At the close of the nineteenth century we look with just pride on 

 the mighty and incomparable advances which human science and cul- 

 ture have made during its course — the natural sciences excelling all 

 others. These facts are characteristically expressed by the statement 

 we often hear that this is the " great" century, or the " age of natural 

 science." Every single science that concerns itself with the knowledge 

 and history of nature claims for itself that it can show the greatest 

 advances and excels all others, and it can also show good ground for 

 such an opinion. But a nonpartisan and unprejudiced philosopher who 

 should survey the entire field would award the first prize of victory to 

 our zoology above all others ; for it was in her bosom that was born 

 evolution, or the theory of descent, that powerful branch of the theory 

 of development for which John Lamarck, in 1809, laid the founda- 

 tion, and which fifty years later Charles Darwin brought to general 

 attention. 



It is not my task to lay before you now the fundamental significance 

 and the priceless worth of the theory of descent. Indeed, the entire 

 science of biology is to-day interpenetrated with it. No great and gen- 

 eral question in zoology and botany, in anatomy and physiology, can 

 be discussed and solved without the question of origins, "the genesis 

 of the generated," presenting itself before everything else. This ques- 

 tion was, however, quite unknown when Charles Darwin, the great 

 reformer of biology, began his academic studies in Cambridge, and, 

 indeed, as a student of divinity. This occurred in that memorable year, 

 1828, in which Carl Ernst von Baer published in Germany his classical 

 " History of the development of animals," the first successful attempt 

 to explain by " observation and reflection " the genesis of the animal 

 body, and to investigate the " history of the growing individual in 

 every relation," from the simplest germ throughout the completed cycle. 

 Darwin knew nothing of these mighty advances, and he could have had 

 no presentiment that this history of germs, embryology, or ontogeny, 



1 A discourse delivered at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists at Cam- 

 bridge, England, August 26, 1898. Translated from the author's edition in German ; 

 printed at Bonn, 1898. 



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