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We have no disposition to charge such materialists as Professors Tyndall, Bastian, Haeckel, Virchow, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, with directing their experimental batteries against the phenomenal facts of "life" for the purpose of overthrowing the foundations of religious faith and belief in the world.
Haeckel extricated himself with even greater ease, by declaring that he had "neither time nor inclination" for reply, and that a mutual understanding with Loofs was impossible because their scientific views were entirely different.
Those long ages of unicellular life in the old seas, how immense they appear to have been; then how the age of invertebrates dragged on, millions upon millions of years; then the age of fishes; the Palaeozoic age, how vast put by Haeckel at thirty-four millions of years, adding rock strata forty-one thousand feet thick; then the Mesozoic or third period, the age of reptiles, eleven million years, with strata twelve thousand feet thick.
Not only religious leaders like Harnack and Eucken, but leading Rationalists like Haeckel and Ostwald, have cordially supported the action of their country. So it was from the first.
With Du Bois-Reymond, Virchow, Haeckel, the anti-vitalistic trend became more definite and more widespread. It had a powerful ally in the Darwinian theory, which had been promulgated meanwhile, and at the same time in the increasingly materialistic tendency of thought, which afforded support to the mechanical system and also sought foundations in it.
But, fortunately, one is rescued from this most un-German predicament by the porter of a waiting hotel omnibus, and so at last we have time to look about us, and to awaken to a realizing sense that we have reached the land of traditions; that we have come to Mecca; that we are in the quondam home of Guericke, Fichte, Goethe, Schiller, Oken, and Gagenbaur; in the present home of Haeckel.
Haeckel was so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are exactly alike.
Though Haeckel his large experience of Monera fortified by the discovery of a close parallel near Greenland in 1876 would not desert Bathybius, the rest of its sponsors gave it up. The evidence in this particular case was tainted. At the meeting of the British Association in 1879 Huxley came forward and took occasion to "eat the leek" in a speech as witty as it was candid.
Latin verses may not be what conservatives fondly deem them, and even cricket may, it is said, become too absorbing a pursuit, but either or both are better than precocious freethinking and sacrifice on the altar of the Beautiful. A big boy who is tackling Haeckel or composing virelais in playtime is doing himself no good, and is worse than useless to the society of which he is a member.
IV. Professor Haeckel proposes a number of modifications in Taxonomy, all of which are well worthy of consideration.
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