only by anti-Darwinians, or rather anti-Evolutionists, but also by many of those who, having accepted the principle of transformism, ought to have known better. Perhaps they thought they did know better. Imperfections or mistakes in details of the grand attempt,—and these, naturally, were many,—were singled out as samples of the whole, which was ridiculed as the romance of a dreamer.
In the end, however, this hostility, narrow-minded and unfair in many respects, has done good to the cause. There has arisen an ever-increasing school of workers in favour of the new doctrine. Owing to renewed research, criticism, corrections in all directions, we now know considerably more about natural classification (and this is pedigree) than when Haeckel first opened out the whole problem.
Owing to his fearless mode of exposition, regardless of the indignant wrath which the new doctrine aroused in certain ecclesiastical
