note the share which the successive generations of Jena
professors have taken in the great upward struggle. But we must
not pause for that here. Our real concern, despite the haunting
reminiscences, is not with the Jena of the past, but with the Jena of
to-day; not with ghosts, but with the living personality who has made
the Jena of our generation one of the greatest centres of progress in
human thought in all the world. Jena is Jena to-day not so much because
Guericke and Fichte and Hegel and Schiller and Oken taught here in the
past, as because it has for thirty-eight years been the seat of the
labors of Germany's greatest naturalist, one of the most philosophical
zoologists of any country or any age, Professor Ernst Haeckel. It is of
Professor Haeckel and his work that I chiefly mean to write, and if I
have dwelt somewhat upon Jena itself, it is because this quaint, retired
village has been the theatre of Haeckel's activities all the mature
years of his life, and because the work he has here accomplished could
hardly have been done so well elsewhere; some of it, for reasons I shall
presently mention, could hardly have been done elsewhere at all--at
least in another university.

It was in 1861 that young Dr. Haeckel came first to Jena as a teacher.
He had made a tentative effort at the practice of medicine in Berlin,
then very gladly had turned from a distasteful pursuit to the field of
pure science. His first love, before he took up the study of medicine,
had been botany, though pictorial art, then as later, competed with
science for his favorable attention. But the influence of his great
teacher, Johannes Mueller, together with his medical studies, had turned
his attention more directly to the animal rather than vegetable life,
and when he left medicine it was to turn explicitly to zoology as a life
study. Here he believed he should find a wider field than in art, which
he loved almost as well, and which, it may be added, he has followed all
his life as a dilettante of much more than amateurish skill. Had he so
elected, Haeckel might have made his mark in art quite as definitely
as he has made it in science. Indeed, even as the case stands, his
draughtsman's skill has been more than a mere recreation to him, for
without his beautiful drawings, often made and reproduced in color, his
classical monographs on various orders of living creatures would have
lacked much of their present value.

Moreover, quite aside fro