In an earlier chapter Professor Bölsche tells the moving story of the writing of the _General Morphology_: the young man making his masterly appeal to the scientists of Germany, which he thinks they will read over his grave. There is a singular parallel to this in Haeckel’s attitude at the time when Bölsche closed his work. Haeckel had just written another “last will and testament,” another proud and defiant utterance of what he felt to be the truth about God and man and nature. Once more he seemed to see the marble gates at the close of his career, and his sombre glance fell round on a world that was, he thought, sinking into reaction. This time he appealed to the people. The five years that have followed have witnessed an extraordinary response on the part of the people. With the speed of a popular romance his work has flown through Europe. He has received a hundred proofs that, at all events, the ideas he thinks to be fraught with salvation for humanity are being considered and discussed in wide circles that had never before known that there was a “riddle of the universe.” He has been urged in the heart of the Sahara to read his own works. He has met, as he travelled on an Alpine railway, cultured nuns who told him they had learned evolution from “Professor Haeckel’s works.” He has looked down with mingled feeling on the wild applause of a gathering of thousands of Socialists. He has been immortalised—strangest and last of all apotheoses—in an academic history of philosophy! The present chapter will tell the story of these five stirring years. It will aim at conveying to the English reader, by plain presentment of facts, a full picture of the activity that has attracted or distracted the attention of so many in the last few years. If Dr. Gramzow is right, if through these five years of indefatigable labour the aged scientist has become a “sower of the future,” it is well for friend and foe to understand him.