Ernst Haeckel

"The publication of the present work on The Wonders of Life has been occasioned by the success of The Riddle of the Universe, which was written five years prior to this volume. Within a few months of the issue of this study of the monistic philosophy, in the autumn of 1899, ten thousand copies were sold. The clear opposition of the author's monistic philosophy, based as it was on the most advanced and sound scientific knowledge, to the conventional ideas and to an outworn "revelation," led to the publication of a vast number of criticisms and attacks. The present work on the wonders of life is, as the title indicates, a supplementary volume to The Riddle of the Universe. While the latter undertook to make a comprehensive survey of the general questions of science--as cosmological problems--in the light of the monistic philosophy, the present volume is confined to the realm of organic science, or the science of life. It seeks to deal connectedly with the general problems of biology, in strict accord with the monistic and mechanical principles which had been laid down by the author in 1866 in his work titled, General Morphology. In the latter publication, special stress was placed on the universality of the law of substance and the substantial unity of nature, which had been further treated in the second and fourteenth chapters of The Riddle of the Universe. The arrangement of the vast material for this study of the wonders of life was modeled on that of the Riddle. Retained in the present volume is the division into larger and smaller sections and the synopses of the various chapters. Thus the whole biological content falls into four sections and twenty chapters"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

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