defect in academic philosophy: it has little or no sympathy with real scientific work; in fact, it studiously avoids such sympathy in the consciousness of its own weakness. Hence it has, like every other layman with general interests, to wait for attempts to popularise scientific work before it can know what is going on in the serious camp. The man who wants to-day to criticise the mechanical conception of nature should first make himself acquainted with these chapters of the _Morphology_. How many know the mere title of the work? How many even of those who evince great hostility whenever Haeckel’s name is mentioned? The book contains much more than the methodological introduction. This only takes up the first hundred pages, but it contains the whole programme. We start off, therefore, under full sail for a new epoch of thought, for natural philosophy; but we must keep an alert mind. The deeper task, that Darwin only gave the means of accomplishing, was to reduce all living things, animal or vegetal, to the inorganic. The laws of life must be merely certain complications of the simple laws that are encountered directly in chemistry and physics, and rule throughout nature. It must be one of the first aims of a general philosophic morphology to open out a path in this direction. The living and what is called the “dead” must be compared. Linné’s three rigid kingdoms—animal, plant, and mineral—needed definitions in harmony with the new ideas. Haeckel himself had discovered the “monera,” the living particles of plasm that did not seem to have reached the stage of the true cell. Here, clearly, was the lowest level of the living. At the same time we reach the most complex specimen of the inorganic from the morphological point of view—that is to say, the most interesting in its individual form—the crystal. The differences begin to give way. What marvellously similar functions! From the dead mother-water is built up, purely by chemico-physical laws, the beautiful structure of the crystal. From the lowest living particle of plasm without any special organs, as we see in the radiolaria, are formed the beautiful siliceous frames that Haeckel had collected in such quantities at Messina. Is it more than a hair’s breadth to pass from one to the other? The deeper we go in the study of living things, the slighter become the differences that separate them from “dead matter.” On the other hand, the higher we go in the structure of crystals, the more striking is the resemblance to the living thing. Two chains of thought seem to be started. What we call “dead” is really alive: what we call living is really subject to the same laws as the “dead.” The solution is found in complete Monism. Living and dead are not antithetic. Nature is one; though we see it in different stages of development. We call one of them the crystal, another the cell, or the moneron, or the protozoon; another the plant, another the animal. Historically it all hangs together. The same laws