Volume V Part 7 (1/2)
Thus I, who am an early riser, begin work at five in summer and six in winter, after the customary light breakfast of coffee and rolls. I do not take a second breakfast at ten or eleven, as many Germans do, but work continuously until one o'clock, when I have dinner. This, with me, as with all Germans, is the hearty meal of the day. After dinner I perhaps take a half-hour's nap; then read the newspaper, or chat with my family for an hour, and perhaps go for a long walk. At about four, like all Germans, I take my cup of coffee, but without cake or other food.
Then, at four, having had three full hours of brain-rest and diversion, I am ready to go to work again, and can accomplish four hours more of work without undue fatigue. At eight I have my rather light supper, and after that I attempt no further work, giving the evening to reading, conversation, or other recreation. I do not retire till rather late, as I require only five or six hours' sleep.”
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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 cla.s.s-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 ill.u.s.trating 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 att.i.tude, will pa.s.s 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 pa.s.ses 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 cla.s.s to some particular phase of the subject just pa.s.sing under their individual observation, and in the most informal of talks, ill.u.s.trated 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 sh.e.l.l 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'etre_, 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.sifiers 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 ident.i.ty 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 a.s.signed by a scientific cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.sification would be complete for all time. A survey of the completed schedule of cla.s.sification 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.
In the application of this relatively simple scheme, to be sure, no end of difficulties were encountered. Each higher animal is composed of so many members and organs, of such diverse variations, that naturalists could never agree among themselves as to just where a balance of affinities between resemblances and differences should be struck; whether, for example, a given species varied so much from the type species of a genus--say the genus Gothic house--as to belong properly to an independent genus--say Romanesque house; or whether, on the other hand, its divergencies were still so outweighed by its resemblances as to permit of its retention as an aberrant member of genus number one.
Perpetual quibbling over these matters was quite the order of the day, no two authorities ever agreeing as to details of cla.s.sification. The sole point of agreement was that preconceived types were in question--if only the zoologists could ever determine just what these types were.
Meantime, the student who supposed cla.s.sifications to be matters of moment, and who laboriously learned to label the animals and birds of his acquaintance with an authoritative Latin name, was perpetually obliged to unlearn what he had acquired, as a new cla.s.sifier brought new resources of hair-splitting pursuit of a supposed type or ideal to bear on the subject. Where, for example, our great ornithologists of the early part of the century, such as Wilson and Audubon, had cla.s.sed all our numerous hawks in a genus falco, later students split the group up into numerous genera--just how many it is impossible to say, as no two authorities agreed on that point. Wilson, could he have come back a generation after his death, would have found himself quite at a loss to converse with his successors about the birds he knew and loved so well, using their technical names--though the birds themselves had not changed.
Notwithstanding all the differences of opinion about matters of detail, however, there was, nevertheless, substantial agreement about the broader outlines of cla.s.sifications, and it might fairly enough have been hoped that some day, when longer study had led to finer discrimination, the mysteries of all the types of creation would be fathomed. But then, while this hope still seemed far enough from realization, Charles Darwin came forward with his revolutionizing doctrine--and the whole time-honored myth of ”types” of creation vanished in thin air. It became clear that the zoologists had been attempting a task utterly Sisyphean. They had sought to establish ”natural groups” where groups do not exist in nature. They were eagerly peering after an ideal that had no existence outside their imagination.
Their barriers of words could not be made to conform to barriers of nature, because in nature there are no barriers.
What, then, was to be done? Should the whole fabric of cla.s.sification be abandoned? Clearly not, since there can be no science without cla.s.sification of facts about labelled groupings, however arbitrary.
Cla.s.sifications then must be retained, perfected; only in future it must be remembered that any cla.s.sification must be more or less arbitrary, and in a sense false; that it is at best only a verbal convenience, not the embodiment of a final ideal. If, for example, we consider the very ”natural” group of birds commonly called hawks, we are quite justified in dividing this group into several genera or minor groups, each composed of several species more like one another than like the members of other groups of species--that is, of other genera. But in so doing we must remember that if we could trace the ancestry of our various species of hawks we should find that in the remote past the differences that now separate the groups had been less and less marked, and originally quite non-existent, all the various species having sprung from a common ancestor. The genera of to-day are cousin-groups, let us say; but the parents of the existing species were of one brood, brothers and sisters.
And what applies to the minor groups called genera applies also, going farther into the past, to all larger groups as well, so that in the last a.n.a.lysis, all existing creatures being really the evolved and modified descendants of one primordial type, it may be said that all animate creation is but a single kind. In this broadened view the details of cla.s.sification ceased to have the importance once ascribed to them, and the quibblings of the cla.s.sifiers seem amusing rather than serious.
Yet the changed point of view left the subject by no means barren of interest. For if the mult.i.tudinous creatures of the living world are but diversified twig-lets of a great tree of ascent, spread by branching from a common root, at least it is worth knowing what larger branches each group of twiglets--representing a genus, let us say--has sprung from. In particular, since the topmost twig of the tree is represented by man himself and his nearest relatives, is it of human interest to inquire just what branches and main stems will be come upon in tracing back the lineage of this particular offshoot. This attempt had, perhaps, no vast, vital importance in the utilitarian sense in which these terms are oftenest used, but at least it had human interest. Important or otherwise, it was the task that lay open to zoology, and apparently its only task, so soon as the Darwinian hypothesis had made good its status.
The man who first took this task in hand, and who has most persistently and wisely followed it, and hence the man who became the recognized leader in the field of the new zoology, was, as I have already intimated, Professor Haeckel. His hypothetical tree of man's lineage, tracing the ancestry of the human family back to the earliest geological times and the lowest orders of beings, has been familiar now for just a third of a century. It was at first confessedly only a tentative genealogy, with many weak limbs and untraced branches. It was perfected from time to time, as new data came to hand, through studies of paleontology, of embryology, and of comparative anatomy. It will be of interest, then, to inquire just what is its status today and to examine briefly Professor Haeckel's own most recent p.r.o.nouncement regarding it.
Perhaps it is not worth our while here to go too far down towards the root of the genealogical tree to begin our inquiry. So long as it is admitted that the remote ancestry is grounded in the lowest forms of organisms, it perhaps does not greatly matter to the average reader that there are dark places in the lineage during the period when our ancestor had not yet developed a spinal column--when, in other words, he had not attained the dignity of the lowest fish. Neither, perhaps, need we mourn greatly that the exact branch by which our reptilian or amphibian non-mammalian ancestor became the first and most primitive of mammals is still hidden in unexplored recesses of early strata. The most patrician monarch of to-day would not be greatly disturbed as to just who were his ancestors of the days of the cave-dweller. It is when we come a little nearer home that the question begins to take on its seemingly personal significance. Questions of grandparents and great-grandparents concern the patrician very closely. And so all along, the question that has interested the average casual investigator of the Darwinian theory has been the question as to man's immediate ancestor--the parents and grandparents of our race, so to speak. Hence the linking of the word ”monkey” with the phrase ”Darwinian theory” in the popular mind; and hence, also, the interpretation of the phrase ”missing link” in relation to man's ancestry, as applying only to our ancestor and not to any other of the gaps in the genealogical chain.
What, then, is the present status of Haeckel's genealogical tree regarding man's most direct ancestor? Prom what non-human parent did the human race directly spring? That is a question that has proved itself of lasting, vital human interest. It is a question that long was answered only with an hypothesis, but which Professor Haeckel to-day professes to be able to answer with a decisive and affirmative citation not of theories but of facts. In a word, it is claimed that man's immediate ancestor is now actually upon record, that the much-heralded ”missing link” is missing no longer. The princ.i.p.al single doc.u.ment, so to speak, on which this claim is based consists of the now famous skull and thigh-bone which the Dutch surgeon, Dr. Eugene Dubois, discovered in the year 1891 in the tertiary strata of the island of Java. Tertiary strata, it should be explained, had never hitherto yielded any fossils bordering on the human type, but this now famous skeleton was unmistakably akin to the human. The thigh in particular, taken by itself, would have been p.r.o.nounced by any competent anatomist to be of human origin.
Unquestionably the individual who bore it had been accustomed to take an erect att.i.tude in walking. And yet the skull was far inferior in size and shape to that of any existing tribe of man--was, indeed, rather of a simian type, though, on the other hand, of about twice the capacity of any existing ape. In a word, it seemed clear that the creature whose part skeleton had been found by Dr. Dubois was of a type intermediate between the lowest existing man and the highest existing man-apes. It was, in short, the actual prototype of that hypothetical creature which Haeckel, in his genealogical tree, had christened _pithecanthropus_, the ape-man. As such it was christened _Pithecanthropus erectus_, the erect ape-man.
Now the discovery of this remarkable form did not make Professor Haeckel any more certain that some such form had existed than he was thirty years before when he christened a hypothetical subject with the t.i.tle now taken by a tangible claimant. But, after all, there is something very taking about a prophecy fulfilled, and so the appearance of _Pithecanthropus erectus_ created no small sensation in the zoological world. He was hailed by Haeckel and his followers as the veritable ”missing link,” and as such gained immediate notoriety. But, on the other hand, a reactionary party at once attacked him with the most bitter animadversions, denouncing him as no true ancestor of man with a bitterness that is hard to understand, considering that the origin of man from _some_ lower form has long ceased to be matter of controversy.