A History of Science — Volume 5

by Henry Smith Williams; Edward Huntington Williams

Such is the method of labor division that enables not Professor Haeckel only, but a host of other German brain-workers to accomplish enormous labors, yet to thrive on the accomplishment and to carry the ruggedness and health of youth far into the decades that are too often with our own workers given over to decrepitude. Haeckel at sixty-five looks as if he were good for at least a score of years of further effort. And should he fulfil the promise of his present rugged-ness, he will do no more than numbers of his colleagues in German universities have done and are doing. When one runs over the list of octogenarians, and considers at the same time the amount of the individual output of the best German workers, he is led to feel that Professor Haeckel was probably right in giving up the continuous-day method of labor and reverting to the German method.

In addition to the original researches that Professor Haeckel has carried out, to which I have already made some reference, there has, of course, been all along another large item of time-consumption to be charged up to his duties as a teacher. These, to be sure, are somewhat less exacting in the case of a German university professor than they are in corresponding positions in England or America. Thus, outside the hours of teaching, Professor Haeckel has all along been able to find about eight hours a day for personal, original research. When he told Professor Huxley so in the days of their early friendship, Huxley exclaimed: "Then you ought to be the happiest man alive. Why, I can find at most but two hours a day to use for myself."

So much for the difference between German methods of teaching, where the university professor usually confines his contact with the pupils to an hour's lecture each day, and the English system, according to which the lecturer is a teacher in other ways as well. Yet it must be added that in this regard Professor Haeckel is not an orthodox German, for his contact with his students is by no means confined to the lecture-hour. Indeed, if one would see him at his best, he must go, not to the lecture-hall, but to the laboratory proper during the hours when Professor Haeckel personally presides there, and brings knowledge and inspiration to the eager band of young dissectors who gather there. It will perhaps seem strange to the reader to be told that the hours on which this occurs are from nine till one o'clock of a day which is perhaps not devoted to class-room exercises in any other school of Christendom whatever—namely, the Sabbath. It is interesting to reflect what would be the comment on such a procedure in London, for example, where the underground railway trains even must stop running during the hours of morning service. But Jena is not London, and, as Professor Haeckel says, "In Jena one is free. It pleases us to have our Sabbath service in our tabernacle of science."

All questions of time aside, it is a favored body of young men who occupy the benches in the laboratory during Professor Haeckel's unique Sunday-morning service. Each student has before him a microscope and a specimen of the particular animal that is the subject of the morning's lesson. Let us say that the subject this morning is the crawfish. Then in addition to the specimens with which the students are provided, and which each will dissect for himself under the professor's guidance, there are scattered about the room, on the various tables, all manner of specimens of allied creatures, such as crabs, lobsters, and the like. There are dissected specimens also of the crawfish, each preparation showing a different set of organs, exhibited in preserving fluids. Then there are charts hung all about the room illustrating on a magnified scale, by diagram and picture, all phases of the anatomy of the subjects under discussion. The entire atmosphere of the place this morning smacks of the crawfish and his allies.

The session begins with a brief off-hand discussion of the general characteristics and affinities of the group of arthropoda, of which the crawfish is a member. Then, perhaps, the professor calls the students about him and gives a demonstration of the curious phenomena of hypnotism as applied to the crawfish, through which a living specimen, when held for a few moments in a constrained attitude, will pass into a rigid "trance," and remain standing on its head or in any other grotesque position for an indefinite period, until aroused by a blow on the table or other shock. Such are some of the little asides, so to speak, with which the virile teacher enlivens his subject and gives it broad, human interest. Now each student turns to his microscope and his individual dissection, and the professor passes from one investigator to another with comment, suggestion, and criticism; answering questions, propounding anatomical enigmas for solution—enlivening, vivifying, inspiring the entire situation.

As the work proceeds, Professor Haeckel now and again calls the attention of the entire class to some particular phase of the subject just passing under their individual observation, and in the most informal of talks, illustrated on blackboard and chart, clears up any lurking mysteries of the anatomy, or enlivens the subject with an incursion into physiology, embryology, or comparative morphology of the parts under observation. Thus by the close of the session the student has something far more than a mere first-hand knowledge of the anatomy of the crawfish—though that in itself were much. He has an insight also into a half-dozen allied subjects. He has learned to look on the crawfish as a link in a living chain—a creature with physiological, psychological, ontological affinities that give it a human interest not hitherto suspected by the novitiate. And when the entire series of Sunday-morning "services" has been carried through, one order after another of the animal kingdom being similarly made tribute, the favored student has gone far towards the goal of a truly philosophical zoology, as different from the old-time dry-bones anatomy as the living crawfish is different from the dead shell which it casts off in its annual moulting time.

THE NEW ZOOLOGY

What, then, is the essence of this "philosophical zoology" of which Haeckel is the greatest living exponent and teacher and of which his pupils are among the most active promoters? In other words, what is the real status, and the import and meaning, the raison d'être, if you will, of the science of zoology to-day?

To clear the ground for an answer to that question, one must glance backward, say half a century, and note the status of the zoology of that day, that one may see how utterly the point of view has changed since then; what a different thing zoology has become in our generation from what it was, for example, when young Haeckel was a student at Jena back in the fifties. At that time the science of zoology was a conglomeration of facts and observations about living things, grouped about a set of specious and sadly mistaken principles. It was held, following Cuvier, that the beings of the animal kingdom had been created in accordance with five preconceived types: the vertebrate, with a spinal column; the articulate, with jointed body and members, as represented by the familiar crustaceans and insects; the mollusk, of which the oyster and the snail are familiar examples; the radiate, with its axially disposed members, as seen in the starfish; and the low, almost formless protozoon, most of whose representatives are of microscopic size. Each of these so-called classes was supposed to stand utterly isolated from the others, as the embodiment of a distinct and tangible idea. So, too, of the lesser groups or orders within each class, and of the still more subordinate groups, named technically families, genera; and, finally, the individual species. That the grouping of species into these groups was more or less arbitrary was of course to some extent understood, yet it was not questioned by the general run of zoologists that a genus, for example, represented a truly natural group of species that had been created as variations upon one idea or plan, much as an architect might make a variety of houses, no one exactly like any other, yet all conforming to a particular type or genus of architecture—for example, the Gothic or the Romanesque. That each of the groups defined by the classifiers had such status as this was the stock doctrine of zoology, as also that the individual species making up the groups, and hence the groups themselves, maintained their individual identity absolutely unaltered from the moment of their creation, throughout all successive generations, to the end of their racial existence.

Such being the fundamental conception of zoology, it remained only for the investigator to study each individual species with an eye to its affinities with other species, that each might be assigned by a scientific classification to the particular place in the original scheme of creation which it was destined to occupy. Once such affinities had been correctly determined and interpreted for all species, the zoological classification would be complete for all time. A survey of the completed schedule of classification would then show at a glance the details of the preconceived system in accordance with which the members of the animal kingdom were created, and zoology would be a "finished" science.