Bronn had himself become something of a revolutionary amongst his colleagues by the translation. The rigidly “exact” workers crossed themselves before the Germanised work. Most of the “evolutionists” in the older sense had by no means the _bonhomie_ to speak even of a “possibility” like the patriarch Bronn. From the first Darwin was—Haeckel was the first to experience it—branded with the anathemas of the two opposite schools of science in Germany. On the one hand the rigorous and exact workers declared that his teaching was pure metaphysics, because it sought to prove evolution and contemplated vast ideal connections. On the other hand the Dualist metaphysicians denounced him as an empiric of the worst character, who sought to replace the great ideal elements in the world by a few miserable natural necessities. It is significant to find that Schopenhauer, the brilliant thinker, regarded the _Origin of Species_ as one of the empirical soapsud or barber books produced by exact investigation, which he thoroughly despised from his metaphysical point of view. And there were already (there are more to-day) whole schools of zoology and botany that looked upon Darwin’s theoretical explanations as unscientific “mysticism,” “metaphysics,” and “philosophy in the worst sense of the word.” Haeckel read the dangerous book at Berlin in May, 1860. “It profoundly moved me,” he writes to me, “at the first reading. But as _all_ the Berlin magnates (with the single exception of Alexander Braun) were against it, I could make no headway in my defence of it. I did not breathe freely until I visited Gegenbaur at Jena (June, 1860); my long conversations with him finally confirmed my conviction of the truth of Darwinism or transformism.” It was, therefore, in the critical days immediately before or during the negotiations with Gegenbaur which led to his setting up as a private teacher at Jena. The names of Darwin and Jena unite chronologically in Haeckel’s life—two great names that were to bear him into the very depths of his career, and that have their roots in the same hour. We may ask what it was in the book that “profoundly moved” the young student of the radiolaria. The name of Braun only partly explains the matter, as Braun was an evolutionist of the same type as Bronn. He was amiably disposed to meet it, but did not openly enter on the new path. We must go deeper. We then understand it clearly enough, if we recollect Haeckel’s bent in the last few years. He had no longer any scruples with regard to religion. The God of tradition had been entirely replaced in him by Goethe’s God, who did not stand outside of, but was one with, nature. “There is nothing within, nothing without: for what is within is without.” There was not a kernel, God, and a shell, Nature. “Nature has neither kernel nor shell: it is both together.”