[CONTENTS]
| PAGE | |
| INTRODUCTION | [7] |
| PREFACE | [11] |
| CHAPTER I | |
| The Controversy about Creation | |
| Evolution and Dogma | [15] |
| Plate I.—Genealogical Tree of the Vertebrates | [17] |
| CHAPTER II | |
| The Struggle over our Genealogical Tree | |
| Our Ape-Relatives and the Vertebrate-Stem | [49] |
| Plate II.—Skeletons of Five Anthropoid Apes | [51] |
| CHAPTER III | |
| The Controversy over the Soul | |
| The Ideas of Immortality and God | [83] |
| Plate III.—Embryos of Three Mammals | [85] |
| APPENDIX | |
| Evolutionary Tables | |
| Geological Ages and Periods | [115] |
| Man's Genealogical Tree—First Half | [116] |
| Man's Genealogical Tree—Second Half | [117] |
| Classification of the Primates | [118] |
| Genealogical Tree of the Primates | [119] |
| Explanation of Genealogical Table 1. | [120] |
| Postscript | |
| Evolution and Jesuitism | [121] |
[INTRODUCTION]
A few months ago the sensational announcement 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 "Darwin of Germany" 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 partial recantation of some of his colleagues. Many of our journals boldly declined to insert 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 German reporter sometimes drank. But the correction quickly came that the telegram had exactly reversed the position taken up by the great biologist. It is only just to the honourable calling of the reporter to add that, according 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 a Liberal of Haeckel's temper must feel his country to be between Scylla and Charybdis—between an increasingly clear alternative of Catholicism or Socialism—with a helmsman at the wheel whose vagaries inspire no confidence.
The English reader will care to be instructed 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 Germany, had much to do with the inspiring of Haeckel's 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 ensued. It is hardly too much to say that Virchow's ultra-timid reserve in regard to the evolution of man and other questions has died with him. Apart from one or two less prominent anthropologists, and the curious distinction drawn by Dr. A. R. Wallace, science has accepted the fact of evolution, and has, indeed, accepted the main lines of Haeckel's ancestral tree of the human race.