There is only one respect in which one’s personal feeling may be allowed to tinge such a narrative as this. For good or evil Haeckel’s great influence on our generation is a reality. It is the biographer’s duty to record and measure it: the reader’s to appraise it. The future historian of the dramatic course of humanity’s ideals must be left to interpret it in cosmic perspective. Do the stars exult, or do they grow thinner and colder in their light, over this great stirring? The far-distant generation, that will have reached the summit of the hill, will know. We who, with narrow horizon, are cutting our fond paths up the slope, have but the poor luxuries of faith and hope. Yet there is one aspect of Haeckel’s recent life that makes us almost forget the cosmic issues. These five years have been, in literal truth, “crowning years” of his aims. For all the slights and insults that have been showered on the grim worker he has had a rich recompense of honour and love. Even if his ideas are to fade and wither like his laurel crowns, it will be something for a future historian to record that a gentler and more genial light fell about his closing years. As Gramzow says: “He _tried_ to give us his best.” An event that Professor Bölsche has only briefly alluded to in his last crowded chapter was a fitting inauguration of the last decade of Haeckel’s career. On the 17th of February, 1894, his sixtieth birthday was celebrated at Jena. The lover of nature and of the silent study passes uneasily through such functions, but the student of Haeckel’s life must dwell on it. Jena had for some years realised that world-fame somehow attached to the straight, smiling figure that it saw passing daily to the Zoological Institute. It had witnessed the grave procedure of the boycott in the sixties. It had heard distinguished leaders of Churches, like Professor Michelis, brand his works as “a fleck of shame on the escutcheon of Germany,” “an attack on the foundations of religion and morality,” “a symptom of senile marasmus.” It saw all these unworthy attacks sink into confusion, and a new era begin. It heard of greater universities competing for their professor and his refusal to leave them. It saw Bismarck fall on his neck and kiss him repeatedly when, in 1892, he headed the deputation to invite him to Jena; and it noted how the Prince absolutely refused to drive through their town “unless Haeckel comes with me” in the carriage. It gave his name proudly to one of its fine new streets.