H Haeckel , Ernst ( 1834 – 1919 )

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was Charles Darwin's foremost champion at the turn of the nineteenth century. More people prior to World War I learned of evolutionary theory through his voluminous publications than through any other source. His Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural history of creation, 1868) went through 12 increasingly augmented German editions (1868–1920) and was translated into the major European languages. Erik Nordenskiöld, in the first decades of the twentieth century, judged it " the chief source of the world's knowledge of Darwinism " (1936, 515). The crumbling detritus of this synthetic work can still be found scattered along the shelves of most used-book stores. Die Welträthsel (The world puzzles, 1899), which placed evolutionary ideas in a broader philosophical and social context , sold over 40,000 copies in the first year of its publication and well over 15 times that number during the next quarter century—and this only in the German editions. (By contrast, during the three decades between 1859 and 1890, Darwin's On the Origin of Species sold only some 39,000 copies in six English editions.) By 1912, Die Welträthsel had been translated, according to Haeckel's own meticulous tabulations, into 24 languages, including Armen-ian, Chinese, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Esperanto. The young Mohandas Gandhi had requested permission to render it into Gujarati; he believed it the scientific antidote to the deadly religious wars plaguing India. Haeckel achieved many other popular successes, and he produced more than 20 large technical monographs on various aspects of systematic biology and evolutionary history. His studies of radiolarians, medusae, sponges, and siphonophores remain standard references today. These works not only informed the public, but they drew to Haeckel's small university in Jena the largest share of Europe's great biologists of the next generation, among whom were Richard Hertwig Haeckel's influence extended far into succeeding generations of biologists, many of whom recalled reading his popular works as young students. Haeckel received his medical degree from Würzburg in 1858, after which he planned to do his habilitation with Johannes Müller (1801–1858) at –1___ 0___ +1___ 622 36954_u03.qxd 8/8/08 2:48 PM Page 622