When Professor Bölsche closed his biographical sketch in 1900 with the three stars that “still glowed,” he had little suspicion how widely they would yet flame out before they passed from the firmament of biography to that of history. As it has proved, Haeckel was then only entering upon the period of vast popular influence which forms the closing part of his remarkable career. He had in 1900 a few thousand thoughtful readers in several countries beside his own. To-day he is read by hundreds of thousands in Germany, England, France, and Italy, and the fourteen different translations of his most popular work have carried his ideas over the whole world. To-day the thoughts of this professor of zoology in an obscure German town are discussed eagerly by bronzed and blackened artisans in the workshops of London, Paris, and Tokio, as well as throughout Germany. The reader will have noticed in the earlier chapters that the most dignified and disdainful of Haeckel’s opponents have been the academic philosophers. In the year 1905 a Berlin professor of philosophy, a stern critic of his system, devotes a long special section of his _History of Philosophy since Kant_ to Haeckel and his long-contemned speculations. Why? Because, to quote his concluding sentences, “the far-reaching impulse that Haeckel has given will never more die out. He has become a sower of the future. The glad echo that his words have found in a hundred thousand breasts must stir every representative of ruling power in Church and Science to make a closer self-examination, a closer scrutiny of received ideas. Does not the thought press irresistibly upon us that somehow or other we have entered upon the wrong path in our modern development?”[9] Footnote 9: Dr. Otto Gramzow’s _Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant_, p. 503.