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tion* Imbued with an unquestioning faith in the truth of 
these doctrines, he is a perfect Stoic in pressing them, through 
good report and bad report, to their final consequences. No 
writer of the present century, except Ehrenberg, has added so 
copiously to the literature of the lower forms of animal life ; 
none has striven more zealously to make the most of his material. 
But I undertake to say none has been so blinded, both in his 
powers of observation and of deduction, by an overwhelming 
subservience to preconceived hypothesis. 
As already stated, Mr. Mivart has made Haeckel’s writings 
the almost exclusive groundwork of his memoir. Under ordi- 
nary circumstances, and in default of personally acquired expe- 
rience, the ready adoption of the opinions of so distinguished a 
naturalist would hardly be a matter for wonder. But when 
there exist the strongest reasons for considering Mr. Mivart’s 
conclusions as fallacious as many of the assumed facts upon 
which he bases them; and it can be further shown that no 
other writer has ever levelled a more severe indictment against 
Haeckel than Mr. Mivart himself within a quite recent period, 
an appeal to facts rather than to mere authority cannot, I 
should imagine, be regarded as out of place. In order, there- 
fore, to put this statement beyond reach of question, I invite 
attention to the subjoined passage, one only out of several 
equally incisive, from Mr. Mivart’s volume on “ Contemporary 
Evolution,” published just two years ago.*! 
“ Amongst the most recent manifestations of scientific 
materialism may be cited Professor Haeckel’s ‘ History of 
Creation.’ Professor Haeckel is a very instructive writer, 
because his zeal for materialistic pantheism is so fiery that it 
hurries him sometimes into atheistic deductions from supposed 
facts , which later investigations prove to have been fictions 
(i e.g . the supposed organism Bathybius Haeckelii\ , too pro- 
* “ The History of Creation.” By Professor Ernst Haeckel. Translated 
from the German. Vol. i., pp. 234, 244, and Vol. ii., pp. 53, 278, &c. 
t “ Contemporary Evolution.” By St. George Mivart. King & Co., 
London, 1876. 
X The writer of the present article stood absolutely alone, for’many years, in 
his endeavour to expose this monstrous fiction ; and so strong was the influence 
of a great name, that his objections, all of which have since been fully borne 
out, were discredited. On the other hand, Professor Haeckel (the selected 
sponsor for this nidus marts), Dr. Carpenter, and Sir Wyville Thomson,, 
forthwith received it under their patronage, and announced in the “ Proceed- 
ings ” of the Royal Society, almost before the first echoes of Professor 
Huxley’s discovery had died away, that they, too, had come across Bathybius. 
living, spreading out far and wide in one vast sheet over the entire bed of 
ocean, and in every particular answering to the characters claimed for it. 
As for Professor Haeckel, he lost not a day in figuring and describing a 
