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Updated: June 1, 2025
I am amazed at your continuous work, but I suppose, after all these years of it, it is impossible for you to remain idle. I, on the contrary, am very idle, and feel inclined to do nothing but stroll about this beautiful country, and read all kinds of miscellaneous literature. I have asked my friend Mr. Mott to send you the last of his remarkable papers on Haeckel.
A like attempt has been made, by other writers, to escape the inconvenience of calling these dubious organisms by the name of plant or animal; but I confess, it appears to me, that the inconvenience which is eluded in one direction, by this step, is met in two others. Professor Haeckel himself doubts whether the Fungi ought not to be removed into his Protista.
Perhaps the most startling proposition of all those which Professor Haeckel puts before us is that which he bases upon Kowalewsky's researches into the development of Amphioxus and of the Ascidioida, that the origin of the Vertebrata is to be sought in an Ascidioid form.
When I read that the icon of the Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail over the materialism of Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself as best I can in the face of an assumption by a modern educated European which implies that the Irish peasants who tied scraps of rag to the trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten the stay of their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the Russian peasant may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized by his alliance with the countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin and Almroth Wright.
It is interesting to find him, in 1867, criticising Haeckel for his repudiation of the principle of Design. "The Doctrine of Evolution," he says, "is the most formidable opponent of the commoner and coarser forms of teleology."
The human person, like every other many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING PHENOMENON OF ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its vital activities ceases entirely, just as it began." That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has sung "I want to be an angel." Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of immortality.
"A Republic," says Schopenhauer, "is a land that is ruled by the many that is to say, by the incompetent." But Schopenhauer, of course, knew nothing of the American primary, devised by altruistic Hibernians for the purpose of thwarting the incompetent many. Ernst Haeckel was born in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-four, hence he is just seventy-seven years old at this writing.
There was at the time a whole group of enthusiastic Darwinians among the university professors, Haeckel leading the van, who clung to that theory so tenaciously and were so zealous in propagating it, that for a while it seemed impossible for a young naturalist to be anything but a Darwinian. Then the inevitable reaction gradually set in.
Thus, there can be little doubt that the mammary gland was as apparently useless in the remotest male mammalian ancestor of man as in living men, and yet it has not disappeared. Is it then still profitable to the male organism to retain it? II. Professor Haeckel looks upon the causes which have led to the present diversity of living nature as twofold.
Other names are given to the mystery the micellar strings of Naegeli, the biophores of Weismann, the plastidules of Haeckel; they all presuppose millions of molecules peculiarly arranged in the protoplasm. On purely mechanical and chemical principles Tyndall accounts for the growth from the germ of a tree.
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