1 8 GENESIS OF MAN. 



istic diplomacy, never lifts the dark curtain that hangs between 

 the organic and the inorganic world. 



Professor Haeckel is not only an original investigator, but also an 

 original thinker. Primarily a specialist and investigator of the 

 minute histology of living organisms, there is combined in his 

 mental constitution, along with this indispensable talent, a large 

 development of causality which renders it impossible for him to 

 stop with the mere elaboration of details and the simple accumula- 

 tion of facts. To him every fact is one of the terms of a proposi- 

 tion, and every collection of related facts becomes an argument, 

 while the sum total of his knowledge of those minute creatures 

 which he has made a life study constitutes in his mind a philoso- 

 phy. He ' is at once an investigator and a philosopher. To the 

 former quality, his numerous monographs of the lower invertebrates 

 sufficiently testify. His monograph of the Radiolaria (with an atlas 

 of thirty-five copper plates), of the Gcryonidae, of the Siphonopora, 

 but especially of the calcareous sponges, belong to the minutest 

 and most exhaustive histological researches of modern zoology. 

 In all these, but particularly in the last named, the author has con- 

 stantly before him a theorem to demonstrate. He expressly 

 avows that his investigations into the calcareous sponges were 

 undertaken with a view to an analytical solution of the problem of 

 the origin of species. He seems not to have feared thus to invite 

 the charge of having resolved, in this investigation, to verify the 

 argument of Darwin, the perusal of whose great work had induced 

 him to undertake it. Nor does he fail to prove all he hoped to do. 

 On the contrary, he claims to have overwhelmingly established all 

 the principal claims of his English contemporary. The objection 

 had been raised that the Darwinian theory did not rest upon a suf- 

 ficient body of observed facts ; that it was a mere plausible synthe- 

 sis from a too meagre analysis. Haeckel holds up his two volumes, 

 containing the results of his five years of indefatigable labor on 

 these lower organisms, and his atlas with its sixty carefully drawn 

 plates, all elaborated from the most abundant materials from all 

 parts of the world, and challenges the scrutiny of his scientific op- 

 ponents. The doctrine of the fixity and invariability of species, al- 

 ready reeling under the blows of Lamarck and Darwin, he claims, is 

 therein completely demolished. He proves that in this group of ani- 

 mals the number of genera and species depends altogether upon the 



