Book Description:
Last Words on Evolution. A POPULAR RETROSPECT AND SUMMARY BY ERNST HAECKEL, PKOFESSOB AT JENA UNIYEBSITX. TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND EDITION BY JOSEPH McCABE. WITH PORTRAIT AND THREE PLATM8. NEW YORK. PETER ECKLER, PUBLISHER, 35 FULTON STREET, BraunUch Tesch Emil Tesch, Hofphot. Jena. CONTENTS. PAGE INTRODUCTION, ........ 7 PREFACE, 13 CHAPTER L THE CONTROVERSY ABOUT CREATION. Evolution and Dogma, . . . . . , 19 PLATE L Genealogical Tree of the Vertebrates, . 20 CHAPTER II. THE STRUGGLE OVER OUR GENEALOGICAL TREE. Our Ape Relatives and the Vertebrate Stem, . . 69 PLATE II. Skeletons of Five Anthropoid Apes, . 70 CHAPTER III. THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SOUL. The Ideas of Immortality and God, . . . .119 PLATE III. Embryos of Three Mammals, . 120 APPENDIX. EVOLUTIONARY TABLES. Geological Ages and Periods, . . . . .165 Mans Genealogical Tree First Half , . . , 166 Mans Genealogical Tree Second Half, , . .167 Classification of the Primates, , . . . .168 Genealogical Tree of the Primates, . . . . 169 Explanation of Genealogical Table I. . . 170 POSTSCRIPT. Evolution and Jesuitism, , . . . , .171 INTRODUCTION. A FEW months ago the sensational an nouncement 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 i Darwin of Ger many 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 par tial recantation of some of his colleagues. Many of our journals boldly declined to in sert 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 Ger 7 Introduction man reporter sometimes drank. But the cor rection quickly came that the telegram had exactly reversed the position taken up by the great biologist. It is only just to the honor able calling of the reporter to add that, ac cording 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 Introduction a Liberal of HaeckeFs temper must feel Ms country to be between Scylla and Charybdis between and Increasingly clear alternative of Catholicism or Socialism with a helms man at the wheel whose vagaries inspire no confidence. The English reader will care to be in structed on the antithesis of Virchow and Haeckel which gives point to these lectures, and which is often misrepresented in this country. Virchow, the greatest pathologist and one of the leading anthropologists of Ger many, had much to do with the inspiring of HaeckeFs Monistic views in the fifties. Like several other prominent German thinkers, Virchow subsequently abandoned the positive Monistic position for one of agnosticism and scepticism, and a long and bitter conflict en sued. It is hardly too much to say that Vir chow s ultra timid reserve in regard to the evolution of man and other questions has died with him...
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