I’ve had the beginnnings of this post hanging around backstage here since the early summer. Today, the handsome cephalopod illustration above showed up on FFFF, and so (in the absence of any compelling alternative) tonight, Ernst Haeckel, this is your blog post.

There are hundreds of pages of lovely illustrations to be had in his Kunstformen der Natur.

Haeckel was a biologist, and his contributions to the field were considerable. It was he who coined the words, phylum, phylogeny, and ecology. He also expounded the so-called Recapitulation Theory, which held that the development of the individual organism retraces the evolutionary path taken by the species of which that individual is a member. If you take a look at the stages of embryonic development, it’s clear that something of that sort is occuring, but Haeckel and some of the people who quoted him, carried this idea into social and political areas, where their applicability is… not so much.

The slim volume pictured (right) is Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, the book where he let his ideas get seriously out of hand, and he tried to make a rationalist religion, Monism, out of them. That didn’t end at all well; his ideas were used by the Nazi party as justifications for racism, nationalism and what has become known as “social Darwinism”. Not everyone who made political use of Haeckel’s work was a fascist, however. There was a very interesting exception in John Hargrave’s Kibbo Kift movement – but that’s a whole other unfinished post in the backstage area of enthusiasm, and it will have to wait for another day.