morning, and uses the hottest hours of the day, from twelve to four, for “anatomical and microscopic work, observing and drawing, and for packing up the material collected.” He met to the full the claim of the nineteenth century, for all the inner poetic tendency of his character. Such a character he must have had to become a philosopher, as he has done; but it lay, as it were, in deeper recesses of his being. To the eye of the observer he seemed to be ever rushing on with a watch in his hand until old age. When we think of the enormous number of problems and the vast range of interests that brought him into the front rank in the nineteenth century, we may say that he advanced at a pace that would have given concern to the aged adviser of his youth in his small world. In the long run we may say of all education as of the physician in the old saying, “The best doctor is the one we don’t need, because we are not ill.” Haeckel was sent to the school at Merseburg. This instruction came to a close in his eighteenth year. He thought of some of his old teachers with affection forty years afterwards. On the whole his later opinion of the usual schooling was as severe as that of many of his contemporaries. In his _General Morphology_ (1866), his most profound work, he speaks of the “very defective, perverse, and often really mischievous instruction, by which we are filled with absurd errors, instead of natural truths, in our most impressionable years.” Sixteen years afterwards (in a speech delivered at Eisenach) he hopes that the triumphant science of evolution “will put an end to one of the greatest evils in our present system of education—that overloading of the memory with dead material that destroys the finest powers, and prevents the normal development of either mind or body.” “This overloading,” he says, “is due to the old and ineradicable error that the excellence of education is to be judged by the quantity of positive facts committed to memory, instead of by the quality of the real knowledge imparted. Hence it is especially advisable to make a more careful selection of the matter of instruction both in the higher and the elementary schools, and not to give precedence to the faculties that burden the memory with masses of dead facts, but to those that build up the judgment with the living play of the idea of evolution. Let our tortured children learn only half what they do, but learn it better, and the next generation will be twice as sound as the present one in body and soul. The reform of education, which, we trust, will be brought about by introducing the idea of evolution, must apply to the mathematical and scientific, as well as the philological and historical sections, because there is the same fault in them all, that far too much material is injected, and far too little attention is paid to its digestion.” Seventeen years later again, in the _Riddle of the Universe_, the elementary schools are severely handled.