The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 1910. HAECKEL AND HIS METHODS

New Zealand Tablet, 16 June 1910, Page 941

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JUNE 16, 1910. HAECKEL AND HIS METHODS

<S||fii R. JOSEPH McCABE-who is at present JHvUHI? touring the world with a series of leefl W/!!li t i lrGS ° n ' Evolution > under the auspices of J&MJIiL tlie Rati °nalist Press Association—is an .rrQfcrS. .eager disciple, an ardent admirer, and a resolute champion of Ernst Haeckel, till Msjft&' lately Professor of Zoology' at the UniverIfesieft sity of Jena— scientist whose deductions from alleged facts of science have been Je j- „ J argely blazoned over the world as a scientific disproof of Christian doctrine. Sir Oliver Lodge speaks of Mr. McCabe as 'the apostle of Haeckel.' In his work EaeckeVs Critics Answered, published first in 1903, McCabe describes Haeckel as going to Jena. with stern and grim resolve to pursue truth through fire and water, and, as Huxley was putting it after a like experience, to smite all humbugs"' that lent their authority to error And a little further on on the same page (p. 8) he says of his hero: 'With phenomenal industry, with brilliant success, and with a moral idealism of the: highest order he continues his research into the nature of life and the nature or man, and long before the close of the century he was in the ..foremost rank of men of science.' Yet less than two years ago this mighty ' smiter of all humbugs,' this follower or truth through fire and water,' this exponent of a moral idealism of the highest order,' was forced by the criticism of other scientists to admit the existence of systematic and deliberate forgeries in his scientific writings. We shall state the facts simply and plainly, so that he who runs may read, and, reading, judge for himself on which side of the controversy the 'humbug' lies..

We shall take first the notorious story of the three wood cuts in Haeckel’s Natural History of Creation. In this, as m Anthropology, or the History of the Evolution of Man he gives numerous plates to prove the similarity in the evolution of the embryos of man and the brutes, . borne of these illustrations,’ says Richard L. Mangan, S.J. in the Catholic World for May, 1909, ‘are pure inventions! whilst some have been borrowed from other scientific works and altered to suit his purpose ! This is a fact which has been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt by such men as Rutimeyer, His, Semper, Henson, Bischoff, and Hamann and strongly censured by them.’ The Catholic World writer proceeds to give the exact facts regarding the three wood cuts. In the first edition of the Natural History of Creation there are three prints (p. 242) side by side to prove that the embryos of man, the ape, and the dog are exactly similar. He easily proves the ‘similarity* for the simple reason that his three prints were all printed from the same engraving. Again, on p. 248, he makes use of a single engraving three times to prove that the embryos of the dog, the chicken, and the turtle are strikingly alike. The device was exposed by a flaw in the block from which the prints were taken, and which, of course reappeared in all throe; and Professor Riitimeyer, who* was the first to call attention to this dishonest trick, characterised it as ‘an offence against scientific truth exceedingly damaging to the public credit of the investigator.’ After he bad been found out, Haeckel conceded that he had been guilty of ‘ a thoughtless piece of folly.’ ' "

'But the later exposure of Haeckeliau forgeries is even more deadly, partly because of its unanswerable completeness, and partly because of the denunciation of Haeckel’s methods which it evoked from eminent European scientists. We have gathered the facts from various sources, but.for the quotations from the German journals we are indebted chiefly to America and to the Catholic World article already referred to. Haeckel had published in 1907 a pamphlet, entitled Das Menschen-Problem —i.e., The Problem of Man —in which representations of the embryos of man and of various types of apes were given for purposes of comparison, in order to support his statement that in their rudimentary stages wholly different animals exactly resemble one another, and thus testify that they are all developments from one identical form. After a careful examination of these diagrams, Dr. Arnold Brass came out with a counter pamphlet, Das Affen-Problem —i.e., The Problem of the Ape — (Leipsic, 1908), in which he asserted that many of the diagrams were inaccurate and worthless, and that others had been purposely and deliberately falsified; that in particular, Haeckel's Gibbon-embryo, plate 111. — (a gibbon is a species of tailless anthropoid ape)—was a reproduction of Selenka’s drawing of a Macacus-monkey-erabryo, 15 or 16 vertebrae having been omitted, and the name changed; also that the human embryo (same plate, after drawings by His), had been furnished by Haeckel with 11 vertebrae not occurring in the original. In proof, Brass published four plates, in which the original diagrams and Haeckel’s faked and forged copies appeared side by side.

Under the circumstances escape was impossible, and Haeckel was forced to make some attempt at self-vindica-tion. His reply appeared in the Miinchner Allgemeine Zeitung (No. 2, of January 9, 1909), and contained the following admission: ‘To put an end to this unsavory dispute, I begin at once with the contrite confession that a small number (6 to 8 per cent.) of my embryo-diagrams are really forgeries in Dr. Brass’s sense those namely for which the observed material is so incomplete or insufficient as to compel us ... to fill in and reconstruct the missing links by hypothesis and comparative synthesis. . I should feel utterly condemned and annihilated by this admission were it not that hundreds of the best observers and most reputable biologists lie under the same charge. The great majority of all morphological, anatomical, histological, and erabryological diagrams . . . are not true to nature, but are more or less doctored, schematised, and reconstructed. . . .’

Such a confession staggered oven Haeckel’s friends. The defence was no defence at all, because, as America, points out, ‘professional ethics require that the word schematic ” be always added to every diagram which the author has retouched or invented whereas Haeckel deliberately left his readers under the impression that he was using diagrams from nature To save their own good name, a number of German scientists, all friendly to Haeckel, came forward with the following repudiation of his methods, which appeared in No. 8 of the Munchner Allgemeine Zeitung. It was signed by forty-six professors representing twenty-five German and Austrian universities and scientific schools: ‘The undersigned Professors of Anatomy and Zoology, Directors of Anatomical and Zoological Institutes, etc., hereby declare that they do not approve of the method of “schematising” which Haeckel has in some instances made use of; at the same time, in the interests of science and professional freedom, they condemn in the sharpest manner the warfare waged against Haeckel by Brass and the members of the Kepler-Bund. They declare, moreover, that the evolutionistic idea can suffer no detriment from some few inaccurately reproduced embryo-diagrams.’ (Signaturcsvfollow.)

The last sentence was, of course, unnecessary; for the question at issue was not the bearing of Haeckel’s action on the doctrine of evolution, but simply the honesty or dishonesty of his methodsand on this point the distinguished scientists were compelled, very reluctantly, to declare against him. The reference to the Kepler-Bund--which is a non-religious, non-partisan, purely scientific association—evoked a further weighty condemnation of Haeckel’s forgeries. It appeared in the Augsburger Post-Zeitung of March 23, 1909: — ‘. . . We arc in agreement with the Kepler-Bund, when it demands that henceforth, as in the past, German scientific research shall rest on an uncompromising love of truth, and on the strictest personal sincerity. . . What should we say of a historian who altered the letters of an inscription in order to push through a preconceived personal opinion ? Haeckel’s want of conscientiousness in popularising scientific , facts and philosophic speculations has been shown up by others besides Dr. Brass; we refer particularly to Wilh. His, who in 1875 exposed the arbitrary manner in which Haeckel

modified his scientific data. To declare as unimportant such arbitrary mutilations of the diagrams of other workers as Haeckel has been convicted of by Riitimeyer, His, and x3i ass manifests a laxity of opinion to which we cannot assent. The declaration was signed by twenty-five scientists, members of the Kepler-Bund, and by eleven nonmembers. Nineteen universities, botanical laboratories, etc., of Germany, Switzerland, and Austria were represented by these names, including the University of Jena.

Haeckel s methods thus stand discredited and condemned by the signed verdict of eighty-two of the foremost German authorities, forty-six of whom gave judgment against him much against their will. That Haeckel is an eminent man of science, who, when he speaks of matters upon which his knowledge is really scientific, must be listened to with respect, no one will deny but that cannot excuse him from the gravest charge which can be brought against a scientific investigator—the deliberate tampering with scientific truth. For the present we have been speaking only of Haeckel’s methods, but we may add —on no less an authority than that of Sir Oliver —that not only his methods, but his characteristic theories and deductions also, are now discredited in the scientific world, and are rapidly becoming obsolete. ‘ The progress of thought,’ says Sir Oliver {Life and Matter, p. 28), ‘ has left him, as well as his great English exemplar, Herbert Spencer, somewhat high and dry, belated and stranded by the tide, of opinion which has now begun to flow in. another direction. He is, as it ere, a surviving voice from the middle of the nineteenth century; he represents, in clear and eloquent fashion, opinions which then were prevalent among many leaders of —opinions which they themselves in many cases, and their successors still more, lived to outgrow so that by this time Professor Haeckel’s voice is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, not as the pioneer or vanguard of an advancing army, but as the despairing shout of a standard-bearer, still bold and unflinching, but abandoned by the retreating ranks of his comrades as they march to new orders in a fresh and more idealistic direction.’