In the years 1894-6 Haeckel published the _Systematic Phylogeny_. “We may differ,” says Professor Arnold Lang of it, “as to the value of special or even fundamental opinions in it, but we must stand before this work in astonishment and admiration: astonishment at the vast range of his knowledge—it would seem that one head could contain no more: admiration of the intellectual labour with which the various phenomena are connected and the gigantic mass of material is reduced to order.” The Royal Academy of Science at Turin judged the work the best that had been published in the last four years of the nineteenth century, and awarded its author the Bressa prize, a sum of 10,000 lire. [Illustration: HAECKEL AND A GROUP OF ITALIAN PROFESSORS. HOTEL BRISTOL, GENOA, 1904. Pavona. Cattaneo. Ariola. Berninzo. Porro. Locchi. Andres. Monti. Issel. Orlando. Penzig. Maggi. Haeckel. Morselli. Cattaneo. ] In August, 1898, he made a further visit to England. The International Congress of Zoology met at Cambridge, and Haeckel was invited to deliver an address. He chose his ever-present theme—the evolution of man. The long lecture, or essay, has been translated by Dr. Gadow under the title, _The Last Link_. The title is somewhat misleading, as only a page or two are devoted to “the last link.” Otherwise the little work offers students a most excellent summary of “our present knowledge of the evolution of man,” the title which Haeckel gave it. But the last period of Haeckel’s career is associated chiefly with, and is really inaugurated by his now famous _Riddle of the Universe_, published in 1899. To understand that work, to avoid the extremes of praise and censure that have been lavished on it, one must put oneself in Haeckel’s position at the close of the last century. Mr. Wells has given us a forecast of the coming social order in which the intellectual few are separated by a wider and deeper gulf than ever from the workers and the women of the world. That keen-eyed and judicious social writer has already modified his forecast, but there were symptoms enough of the possibility of such an issue a few years ago. In Germany the signs were ominous to a man like Haeckel. The older Liberalism to which he belonged by tradition and conviction seemed in danger of being ground to dust between the upper and the nether stones of the new political mill—the increasing strength of Social Democracy and the increasing and consequent alliance of Conservative Kaiserism with the still powerful Catholic Church. Haeckel distrusted the power of Demos much as Renan did when he wrote his sombre dialogues in the seventies; and a political alliance with the Vatican opened out to him the grim prospect of a return to the Middle Ages. The freedom of research and teaching for which he had fought with unsparing vigour was, he thought, imperilled by the new alliance, no less than the very existence of culture was endangered by the triumph of Social Democracy.