Chapter 1593

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Such newly-coined words as “perigenesis of plastids,” “plastidule souls” (!), and others less comely, invented by Hæckel, may be very learned and correct in so far as they may express very graphically the ideas in his own vivid fancy. As facts, however, they remain for his less imaginative colleagues painfully cænogenetic—to use his own terminology; i.e., for true Science they are spurious speculations, so long as they are derived from “empirical sources.” Therefore, when he seeks to prove that “the origin of man from other mammals, and most directly from the catarrhine apes, is a deductive law, that follows necessarily from the inductive law of the theory of descent” (Anthropogeny, p. 392, quoted in Pedigree of Man, p. 295.)—his no less learned foes (du Bois-Reymond—for one) have a right to see in this sentence a mere jugglery of words; a “testimonium paupertatis of Natural Science”—as he himself complains, speaking, in return, of du Bois-Reymond’s “astonishing ignorance.” (See Pedigree of Man, notes on pp. 295, 296.)