SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE.





PART FIRST.




I.

VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH.


On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated
embryologist of Jena, delivered at the Congress of Naturalists, which
was held at Munich, an eloquent address defending and propagating
Darwinism, which was at that time the object of the most bitter
polemical attacks.

A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,--an active member
of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in
politics just as much as in science--violently assailed the Darwinian
theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment,
hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political anathema: "Darwinism
leads directly to socialism."