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LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION


[Illustration: Bräunlich & Tesch (Emil Tesch), Hofphot. Jena.
Published by A. Owen & Co., London.

Ernst Haeckel.]


LAST WORDS ON EVOLUTION

A Popular Retrospect and Summary

by

ERNST HAECKEL

Professor at Jena University

Translated from the Second Edition by Joseph McCabe

With Portrait and Three Plates







London
A. Owen & Co.
28 Regent Street, S.W.
1906




CONTENTS


                                                        PAGE

  INTRODUCTION                                             7

  PREFACE                                                 11


  CHAPTER I

  THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT CREATION

  Evolution and Dogma                                     15

  PLATE I.--Genealogical Tree of the Vertebrates          17


  CHAPTER II

  THE STRUGGLE OVER OUR GENEALOGICAL TREE

  Our Ape-Relatives and the Vertebrate-Stem               49

  PLATE II.--Skeletons of Five Anthropoid Apes            51


  CHAPTER III

  THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SOUL

  The Ideas of Immortality and God                        83

  PLATE III.--Embryos of Three Mammals                    85


  APPENDIX

  EVOLUTIONARY TABLES

  Geological Ages and Periods                            115

  Man's Genealogical Tree--_First Half_                  116

  Man's Genealogical Tree--_Second Half_                 117

  Classification of the Primates                         118

  Genealogical Tree of the Primates                      119

  Explanation of Genealogical Table 1.                   120


  POSTSCRIPT

  Evolution and Jesuitism                                121




INTRODUCTION


A few months ago the sensational announcement was made that
Professor Haeckel had abandoned Darwinism and given public support
to the teaching of a Jesuit writer. There was something piquant
in the suggestion that the "Darwin of Germany" had recanted the
conclusions of fifty years of laborious study. Nor could people
forget that only two years before Haeckel had written with some
feeling about the partial recantation of some of his colleagues.
Many of our journals boldly declined to insert the romantic news,
which came through one of the chief international press agencies.
Others drew the attention of their readers, in jubilant editorial
notes, to the lively prospect it opened out. To the many inquiries
addressed to me as the "apostle of Professor Haeckel," as Sir
Oliver Lodge dubs me in a genial letter, I timidly represented that
even a German reporter sometimes drank. But the correction quickly
came that the telegram had exactly reversed the position taken up
by the great biologist. It is only just to the honourable calling
of the reporter to add that, according to the theory current in
Germany, the message was tampered with by subtle and ubiquitous
Jesuistry. Did they not penetrate even into the culinary service at
Hatfield?

I have pleasure in now introducing the three famous lectures
delivered by Professor Haeckel at Berlin, and the reader will
see the grotesqueness of the original announcement. They are the
last public deliverance that the aged professor will ever make.
His enfeebled health forbids us to hope that his decision may yet
be undone. He is now condemned, he tells me, to remain a passive
spectator of the tense drama in which he has played so prominent
a part for half a century. For him the red rays fall level on the
scene and the people about him. It may be that they light up too
luridly, too falsely, the situation in Germany; but the reader will
understand how a Liberal of Haeckel's temper must feel his country
to be between Scylla and Charybdis--between an increasingly clear
alternative of Catholicism or Socialism--with a helmsman at the
wheel whose vagaries inspire no