Editing Ernst Haeckel (section)

=== Darwin, Naturphilosophie and Lamarck ===

Darwin's ''[[On the Origin of Species]]'', which made a powerful impression on Haeckel when he read it in 1864, was very cautious about the possibility of ever reconstructing the history of life, but did include a section reinterpreting von Baer's embryology and revolutionising the field of study, concluding that "Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals." It mentioned von Baer's 1828 anecdote (misattributing it to [[Louis Agassiz]]) that at an early stage embryos were so similar that it could be impossible to tell whether an unlabelled specimen was of a mammal, a bird, or of a reptile, and Darwin's own research using embryonic stages of [[barnacle]]s to show that they are [[crustacean]]s, while cautioning against the idea that one organism or embryonic stage is "higher" or "lower", or more or less evolved.<ref>{{harvnb|Darwin|1859|pp=[http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=text&itemID=F373&pageseq=457 439–450]}}<br />{{harvnb|Darwin|Costa|2011|pp=439–450}}</ref> Haeckel disregarded such caution, and in a year wrote his massive and ambitious ''Generelle Morphologie'', published in 1866, presenting a revolutionary new synthesis of Darwin's ideas with the German tradition of ''[[Naturphilosophie]]'' going back to [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]] and with the progressive evolutionism of [[Lamarckism|Lamarck]] in what he called ''Darwinismus''. He used [[morphology (biology)|morphology]] to reconstruct the [[evolutionary history of life]], in the absence of fossil evidence using embryology as evidence of ancestral relationships. He invented new terms, including [[ontogeny]] and [[phylogeny]], to present his evolutionised recapitulation theory that "ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny". The two massive volumes sold poorly, and were heavy going: with his limited understanding of German, Darwin found them impossible to read. Haeckel's publisher turned down a proposal for a "strictly scholarly and objective" second edition.<ref name=hopwood2006 />{{rp|269–270}}