ON OUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE OF THE ORIGIN OF MAN.[1]
By Ernst Haeckel.
At the close of the nineteenth century we look with just pride on the mighty and incomparable advances which human science and culture have made during its course—the natural sciences excelling all others. These facts are characteristically expressed by the statement we often hear that this is the "great" century, or the "age of natural science." Every single science that concerns itself with the knowledge and history of nature claims for itself that it can show the greatest advances and excels all others, and it can also show good ground for such an opinion. But a nonpartisan and unprejudiced philosopher who should survey the entire field would award the first prize of victory to our zoology above all others; for it was in her bosom that was born evolution, or the theory of descent, that powerful branch of the theory of development for which John Lamarck, in 1809, laid the foundation, and which fifty years later Charles Darwin brought to general attention.
It is not my task to lay before you now the fundamental significance and the priceless worth of the theory of descent. Indeed, the entire science of biology is to-day interpenetrated with it. No great and general question in zoology and botany, in anatomy and physiology, can be discussed and solved without the question of origins, "the genesis of the generated," presenting itself before everything else. This question was, however, quite unknown when Charles Darwin, the great reformer of biology, began his academic studies in Cambridge, and, indeed, as a student of divinity. This occurred in that memorable year, 1828, in which Carl Ernst von Baer published in Germany his classical "History of the development of animals," the first successful attempt to explain by "observation and reflection" the genesis of the animal body, and to investigate the "history of the growing individual in every relation," from the simplest germ throughout the completed cycle. Darwin knew nothing of these mighty advances, and he could have had no presentiment that this history of germs, embryology, or ontogeny,
- ↑ A discourse delivered at the Fourth International Congress of Zoologists at Cambridge, England, August 26, 1898. Translated from the author's edition in German; printed at Bonn, 1898.
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