The Wonders of Life A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy

Abstract

THIS new book by the indefatigable Haeckel is supplementary to his “Riddle of the Universe.” That several hundred thousand copies of the “Riddle” were sold indicates the widespread interest taken in what the author calls “the construction of a rational and solid philosophy of life,” or in what others would call an extremely biological way of looking at things. But the “Riddle” and its solutions raised storms of criticisms and evoked hundreds of reviews—both friendly and hostile—besides many large pamphlets and even a few books, not to speak of more than five thousand letters. To these collectively, friends and foes alike, Haeckel now replies in this “biological sketch-book,” written uninterruptedly in the course of four months when he was completing his seventieth year in a vacation at Rapallo, a tiny coast-town of the Italian Riviera. He had leisure there to think over all the views on organic life which he had formed in the course of a many-sided experience of life and learning since the beginning of his academic studies (1852) and his teaching at Jena (1861). The constant sight of the blue Mediterranean, the animal inhabitants of which he knows so well, his solitary walks in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Apennines, and the moving spectacle of the “forest-crowned mountain altars,” inspired him with “a feeling of the unity of living nature —a feeling that only too easily fades away in the study of detail in the laboratory.” He hopes that his readers may be moved by his book “to penetrate deeper and deeper into the glorious work of Nature, and to reach the insight of our greatest German natural philosopher, Goethe: