Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/141

Rh certainly shown great strength and great courage. Since 1863 he has been, and in this his seventy-sixth year still is, the champion who has almost single-handed made the open fight for the evolution conception and for that complete and extreme dominance of it in sociology, philosophy and religion which he terms monism. And he has made this fight with such success that the two chief opposing combatants, "throne and altar," as he terms them, see in him one of the greatest dangers in the world to their special interests. For Haeckel is no longer merely the German champion of Darwinism and monism, but the world champion. The heresies of "The Riddle of the Universe" and "The Wonder of Life" have penetrated all lands and circles of reading and thinking people.

Born in February, 1834, and educated soundly in a Jena gymnasium and then in the universities of Jena, Würzburg and Berlin, Haeckel early showed his strong predilection and special capacity for the study of nature. He was fortunate in coming in these early formative years under the direct tuition and into the close personal companionship of some of Germany's greatest naturalists. He was variously student and assistant of Schleiden, Alex Braun, Albert Kölliker, Franz Leydig, Rudolf Virchow, Carl Gegenbaur and Johannes Müller, a brilliant array of names, and a guarantee for the young naturalist's thorough grounding in the facts and principles of botany, zoology, physiology and medicine. Haeckel's first love was botany, but his father's wish led him to make his degree (M.D., Berlin, 1857) in medicine. The later semesters of his university work and his doctor's dissertation were, however, given to zoology, and it was as an active investigating zoologist that he began his post-student career. This career opened with a year's trip to Sicily, where Haeckel commenced that study of the radiolarians, minute shell-secreting one-celled animals, which he has continued as an authority all through his life. This zoological journey was the first of many, especially to tropic lands and waters, that Haeckel has made, the last one being an expedition to Java and Malay in 1900-1901 in search of prehistoric man!

For forty-five years he has taught, investigated and written in the small Thuringian University at Jena. His calls to larger universities he has steadfastly refused, to remain with the institution that has given him from the first full freedom, if not, perhaps, always full faith and adherence. In the earlier more critical years of his bold declarations and the bitter attacks they excited he felt himself becoming an incumbrance, possibly an actual danger, to his university, and he offered to resign his professorship. But the head of the corporation, Seebeck, said to him:"My dear Haeckel, you are still young and you will come to a riper understanding of life. Anyway, you will do less harm here than elsewhere, so stay!"