This simple fact shows the stuff of Haeckel’s race. The older Sethe was an important man in his time. He left to his children manuscript memoirs of his eventful life, which have, unfortunately, been only sparsely used by Freytag, though the whole deserved to be regarded as a source of history. The general facts in relation to him were collected by Hermann Hüffer, who was not merely interested in the jurist because he was one himself, but was brought into touch with him as a result of his brilliant study of Heine. Sethe’s eldest son, Christian, the uncle of Ernst Haeckel, is the well-known friend of Heine’s youth to whom the poet dedicated the “Fresco-sonnets” in his _Book of Songs_ and wrote the finest of his early letters. This Christian Sethe (he died on May 31, 1857, being then Provincial Director of Revenue at Stettin), was a lawyer, like his father, and the father himself came of a legal family. Haeckel’s own father, moreover, the husband of one of Christian’s sisters, was a State Councillor at the time of his death, and his elder brother was a Provincial Councillor. Thus Haeckel’s genealogical tree spreads into the legal profession in a curiously complex way. We naturally reflect for a moment if we could fancy Haeckel himself as a lawyer. It is hardly possible. He would at least have been a very rebellious member of the profession, and have been sadly lacking in respect for the venerable traditions and powdered wigs of the court—assuming, of course (which a mere layman has no right to question), that there ought still to be such traditions and costumes in the profession. In his vigorous _Riddle of the Universe_ he has, from his scientific point of view, brought strictures against the legal profession that leave nothing to be desired in the way of candour, when we recollect the long tradition of his family. In its lingering in the rear of the progress of the times the whole science of law seemed to him to be a “riddle of the universe.” The jurist is apt to be respected as an embodiment of our highest culture. In reality that is not the case. The distinctive object of his concern, man and his soul, is only superficially studied in the preparation for the law, and so we still find amongst jurists the most extraordinary views as to the freedom of the will, responsibility, and so on. “Most of our legal students pay no attention to anthropology, psychology, and evolution, the first requisites for a correct appreciation of human nature. They ‘have no time’ for it. It is unfortunately all absorbed in a profound study of beer and wine and the ‘noble art’ of fencing; and the rest of their valuable time is taken up in learning some hundreds of paragraphs from the books of law, the knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the jurist to fill any position whatever in the State.”