HAECKEL AND HIS METHODS AN EXPOSURE

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 26, 1 July 1909, Page 1011

HAECKEL AND HIS METHODS AN EXPOSURE

By Richard L. Mangan, S.J. ! '' T

(Concluded.) But the case against Haeckel does not end here. In June, 1908, he delivered at Jena a conference oalled ' The Problem of Man,', in which he exhibited three plates, two of which had already appeared in the Berlin lectures of 1905, designed to prove the affinity between man and, the mammifers. Against these plates Dr. Arnold Brass, in'Ahe Problem of the Ape,* brings serious objec-. tions. Without entering into the minute details of the. accusations, ijye may sum them up as follows : — Plate, I. shows the skeletons of man and of four manapes and bears the title ' Skeletons of Five Man-apes ' (anthropomorpha). Plates, ll. and 111. represent the embryos of different mammifers (the swine, rabbit,- bat, bon, man) at various stages of their development, to sEb~w that at certain periods the human embryo- is scarcely - different from that of- the others.- l ' i /&- According to Dr. Brass, not only has Professor Haefhtel falsely represented various evolutionary stage*|e£ man'/^e monkey, and other mammifers, but he has talln from- the. works of Selenka the figure of a macaco, and;' by shortening ■ its tail, made a^ibbon of it, whilst adding to the original illustration, made by His, of the hiiman embryo! Admirers of Haeckel naturally waited with some anxiety for the answer to these accusations. In the Berliner Volkszeitung of December 29, 1908, and in the Miinchener Allgemeinen Zeitung of January 9, 1909., appeared, an article by Haeckel in which he carefully avoids the joints at issue and resorts to the most illiberal abuse of his opponent. Of the condemned illustrations he can only say that ',they are pictures destined to make 'accessible to a wider circle facts which have been long known.' In this way he thinks he has justified his action. Comment is superfluous. But in the answer to an anonymous protest .v the Miinchener Allgemeinen Zeitung of December 19, 1908, Haeckel proffers an apology which has staggered even his admirers : ' A small number of my numerous embryo-pictures (perhaps y six or eight per cent.) , are really falsified (in the sense of Dr. Brass) — namely, all those figures for which the material possessed by us is so incomplete and insufficient that to make an uninterrupted chain of the evolutive stages, we are forced to fill the gaps by hypotheses, and reconstruct the missing members by comparative syntheses.' After an undignified attempt to shift part of the blame on to the shoulders of the engravers, as if it was not his duty to check their errors, if any occurred, and to notify the reader, he continues: ' After this compromising confession of '^falsification,*' I might have to consider myself sentenced -and annihilated, had I not the consolation of seeing with\me in the ' prisoner's dock hundreds of fellow-culprits, many of them most trustworthy investigators and renowned biologists. The majority q£ figures, morphological, anatomical/ histological, and embfidlogical, circulated and valued in manuals, in reviews, an3l in works . of biology, deserve in the same degree the charge of being falsified. These are all inexact, adapted nibre'ror less, schematised, reconstructed.' We have heard.. before of splendid audacity, but this example is of the best, for in the first place it is untrue that he has made his arbitrary alterations only on A schematic figures ' ; the charge is that he- has made them on figures which he has not given but as schematic at all. Secondly, it is untrue that the majority of biologists use qnly schematic figures in their works. Haeckel is playing fast and Joose with the term. A- schematic figure has always been understood- to mean- a figure which expressly brings out certain features in an - object and in a form reconstructed according to the conception of the maker. A non-schematic figure represents the object as the author has seen it exist, not as he conceives that it might possibly .exist. Serious scientists notify the reader of the f a?t that a figure is schematic, it is obvious, whereas

* Vas Affenproblem,., ' Professqr Haeckel's latest falsification of embryo-pictures,, ru Jkeip:si£,.,. 1908.

Haeckel prints figures with features which he most certainly has not seen, but has imagined, in order to fill up a necessary gap in the facts. This is what his accuser means by falsification, and if' words have any meaning, The Charge Stands Unrefuted. Haeckel's naive confession has shocked many of his friends. Dr. Adolf Koelsch, who had previously spoken of Haeckel as a man ' who for fifty years has, in the name of science, fought against the Christian conception of life,' and a pioneer of progress ' who has won the confidence of the German people,' now writes: 'I was ashamed for Haeckel when I read this passage.' Moreover, a number of the German scientists who were so frankly invited to take their places in the prisoner's dock with him have come forward with the following declaration, which signed by no less than forty-six names : ' We, the undersigned Professors of Anatomy and Zoology, Directors of Anatomical and Zoological Institutes and Natural History Museums, hereby declare that we by no means approve of the manner of schematising which Haeckel in some cases has practised, but that in the interests of science and freedom of thought we most strongly condemn the campaign against Haeckel carried on by Dr. Brass and the Kepler Society. Moreover, we declare that the theory of evolution, as expressed in the theory of descent, can suffer no damage on account of the existence of embryo-pictures which prove nothing.' * Haeckel may well pray to be delivered from his friends. The attempt to cast odium on the Kepler Society as a body of obscurantists is not only beside the mark, as Rutimeyer, His, Semper, and other investigators are not members of it, but it has been frustrated by a dignified protest from the president and director sent to the public press. Whilst welcoming the declaration of the forty-six subscribers that they disapprove of Haeckel's methods, the writers proceed to point out that the insinuation of obscurantism is a deliberate attempt to delude the public as to the aims and objects of the Kepler Society, which not only advocates freedom of research, but contains members who are evolutionists. As for the personalities introduced into the discussion, Haeckel himself is largely to blame, and the Kepler Society claims the right to be judged by its official utterances. Here we might leave the judgment to the fair-minded reader, although the charges against Haeckel are not yet exhausted. The most serious is that preferred by Father Wasmann, who proves that Haeckel has committed an offence greater than the falsification of illustration^, The Falsification of the Ideas of a Great Man. One of Haeckel's latest works, the Problem of Human Life and the Master-Beasts According to Linnaeus (1908) :s: s dedicated to ' Carl von Linne — the discoverer of the Masterbeasts (Primates) — with the esteem of Ernst Haeckel, Professor of the University of Jena, Dr. Med., Berlin, March 7, 1857. Dr. Med. jubilar. Linn&anus, Upsala, May 24, 1907.' t Moreover, he borrows the famous maxim, ' Man, know thyself,' which Linnaeus uses as a motto for his Systema Naturce, so that the dedication, the motto, and the contents of this work are designed to delude the nojiscientific -reader into thinking that Linnseus was of the same mind as Haeckel on the subject of the descent of man. Now that Linnseus, on purely morphological principles, classified man as the species Homo with the species which, according to the knowledge of his time, stood next in order, the ape, the lemur (half -ape), and the bat, and called the class Primates, is a fact which • every reader of the Systema Naturce well knows. In the first edition he classified the s.loth with man and the ape and called them anthropomorpha, or, according \to Haeckel's translation, ' beasts in the shape of men,' But no man would dream of asserting that Linnseus considered the sloth, or the bat, which he - added later, *to be an ancestor of man, Haeckel maintains that he called the Primates ' masterbeasts ' because they were ' the lords of the animal kingdom or especially of organic creatures.' That Linnseus never even thought of the origin of man from the higher Primates we should naturally not expect the German professor to tell us. He simply appeals to Linnseus as the founder of his own view on man as a ' master-beast ' and those who have not read the Systema Naturce naturally conclude that Haeckel and Linnseus class man amongst the Primates in the same sense. This is a gross misrepresentation and a vilification "of the memory of a great man, who expressly states that, in his view, man is outside and above all three kingdoms of nature.

* See the Allgemeine ~Bundsch.au, Munich, February 27, 1909. t This last degree was conferred upon him by the University of Upsala on the occasion of the Bi-Centenary of the birth of Linn»us,

' Homo Sapiens [Man], of all created works the most perfect, the last and highest point, set on earth's crust, marked as it is with marvellous signs of the majesty of God, with power to understand its structure, to admire its beauty, and to bow his head in reverence for its Maker.' * There is not much indication here of that atheistic monism professed by Haeckel and his Monist Society 1 A little further on in the same chapter Lin'nseus writes : 'So is the whole world full of the glory of God, whilst all the works of God glorify Him by means of man, who, raised from dead clay to life by His hand, sees in the end of Creation the majesty of its Maker: man, a guest worthy of his dwelling, the herald of the Most High.' And two pages later: 'The Creator" began with the simplest elements of earth and passed from mineral, plant, and animal to perfect His work in man.' He goes on to show that it is man's noblest duty to know and to glorify God, that the world is God's school where man must learn to recognise Him, the Omniscient, Immortal, Eternal Being, that he must lead a good life here if he .would avoid the penalty of God's justice hereafter. The motto thus splendidly explained is taken over by Haeckel without a word to show that its meaning differs a whole heaven from his own! Throughout this work the connection of man as an animal in Haeckel's sense with his place in Linnseus's ordinal group of the Primates is taken for granted, and as from this purely morphological connection Haeckel concludes that man is descended from the ape, the ordinary reader naturally takes Linnseus's exhortation to self-knowledge to mean : ' Man, recognise that you are nothing better than a highlydeveloped ape!' Once again we find Hypotheses Put Forward as Proved Facts. The origin of the mammals from the amphibia has been ' proved conclusively by the latest researches of zoological and anatomical experts at Upsala.' His conclusions, he asks us to believe, .'are not the result of his own private conviction or prejudice,' but of 'repeated research carried on for the last thirty years by competent investigators.' Yet how dark is the whole problem of the origin of the mammals, and particularly of the Amniote-vertebrates, has been shown by B. Fleischmann, who is supported by Littel, Gegenbauer,, and others. Even Haeckel himself, in 1895. in the third volume- of Systematic Phylogeny, only ventured to put forward an ' imaginary picture ' of the hypothetical ancestral group of all the higher vertebrates, the so-called Pro-reptilia. . But before a ' popular ' audience our conjurer has only to make a pass and the ' imaginary -picture' has become a 'proved fact.' The old assertions which he used to shore up his theory of the ape-origin of man are repeated here without a word of critical comment. The skull-formation of the Primates proves ' that an unbroken chain of evolutionary links stretches from the oldest common radical form (the Archiprimas) up to the man-ape (Pithecanthropus) and to man (Homo). For confirmation of this statement he refers to Plate J. in the Appendix, and the unwary reader naturally supposes' that the Archiprimas, Archipithecus, Prothylobates, end the Pithecanthropus Alalus have been considerate enough 'to leave us their skulls for purposes of comparison. Tho : fact, however, is that these chief members of the direct , series of man's ancestors are transitional forms invented" by Haeckel and never possessed a skull. This attempt, then, to base a proof of 'the unbroken chain of evolutionary links ' on the skull-fqrmation of the Primates is the purest humbug. That Haeckel has done good service in the past to < scientific study, particularly by his work on the sponges, we should be the last^to deny. But that cannot excuse him from the gravest charge which can be brought against a scientific investigator, the deliberate tampering with scientific truth, deliberate misrepresentation of the ideas of a great scientist. He is not the first instance of a * man led astray by a fanatical hatred of Christianity ; but one can only wonder silently that any^ man should hope by such methods to ' fool all the people all the time.'