HAECKEL AND KIS TEACHING,

Evening Post, Volume LXXX, Issue 5, 6 July 1910, Page 2

HAECKEL AND KIS TEACHING,

XO I'HE EDITOR. Sir, — In view of the lectures now boing delivered on evolution in the Town H*li, and -of tue fact that tho Lecturer is tiro ohief English sponsor of the German evolutionist, Hsbeckel, tira following fwsta ofcimot faii to provo interesting to your readers. Professor Haeciel berongß to an association ot moaiste, whose dii&t objects are to prove that man has evoived gradually — developed step by step ironi lower animals ; to refute tho Bible ; and to do away with the belief ' in the immortality of the in-dividual soul, and in. a personal God as Creator. In February last, on attaining kis seventy-fifth birthday, he retired tram tii-o ohiur of zoology at Jena. Shortly before he retired there wae a startling exposure made of some of tixu methods by which he tried to bolster up 80-oalled science against Christianity. Over bis own signature he was oompeilod by other scientists to admit the eustenos ot deliberate forgery in his scientific writings. He had taken drawings of other biologists and altered* them: taking away 15 or 16 vertebrae from one monkey embryo «nd changing the name. Ho also altered a human, embryo so as to ooat*iu 11 vertebrae iiot occurring in tho original— thus, if possible, to bridge the chaenv be. tweon maox and the highest of the lower animals. We h«,vo before ua an extract horn his own confession that appeared last January in tho Munohuer AllgerneitM Zei-t-ung, in whidi he says: — 'To put an> end to this unsavoury dispute, I begin at once with a. contrite confeflsion that a smajl per cent. (6 or 8 por oont.) of my embryo diagrams air© really forgeries. . . . those, namely., for which fee observed . material is so incomplete or insufficient as to compel us ... to fiH in and reconstruct the missing links by hypothesis and synthesis. •I _ should foel utterly condemned' and annihilated by the admission, were it not that hundreds of the best observers and most reputable biologists lio under tha same charge. Tho great majority of all morphokigiaal, anatomical, histological and embryological diagrams are not true to nature, but aro more or less doctored, schematised, and reconstructed." Needless to 6ay the attempt to justify himielf by such an allegation evoked widespread indignation. In a milder document agttod by forty-six professors, reprosß&tinij twanty-fivo Gorman and Austrian Universities and soientifio schools, and in * stronger declaration, wgn«d by twenty-fiva epiontists, representing nineteen UniveratiG» and laboratories in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, Haeckel's methods t>£ cJoetorinff his diagrams to prove hi* theories has been emphatically condemned and. ropudiated. Tho foUowiiig BQnitcuce of Sir Oliver Lodge's may bo added 1 as a fitting cominen.t&ry:— "If they (Haeckel and hs friends) eat up to teach that mint* and what they call mattei are so intimately ooiuneeted that no transcendence is possible, that tho term soul signifies only the sum of plasm movements m tho ganglion cell, then sucn philosophers must bo content with an audience of uneducated pereons."—l am, etc., PRECISION. sth July.