danger, I dare no longer hesitate about
my answer. _Amicus Socrates, amicus Plato, magis amica Veritas._ An
unreserved and public opposition can be no longer postponed. As a
matter of fact, at the Munich meeting, neither did Virchow hear my
speech nor I his. I read my paper, as it is printed, on the 18th
September 1877, and left on the 19th. Virchow came to Munich only on
the 20th, and delivered his speech on the 22d.

Bearing in mind the gratitude which I owe to Virchow as my former
master and friend at Wuerzburg--a gratitude which I have at all times
striven to prove by the further development of his mechanical
theory--I shall confine myself, as far as possible, to an objective
and special confutation of his assertions. Certainly the temptation on
this occasion was a strong one to pay the debt in like kind. In my
Munich lecture, among the few names to which I alluded, I particularly
mentioned that of Virchow as the distinguished founder of
cellular-pathology (p. 12).[7] Virchow's return for this was to heap
scorn and ridicule on the doctrine of evolution in his usual manner.
The critic in the "National-Zeitung," Herr Isidor Kastan, says of this
with particular satisfaction, "The ridicule with which Herr Virchow
treated this side of Haeckel's visions was indeed caustic enough, but
this is ever Virchow's way; only in this case, if in any, he was fully
justified."

I could less easily ignore Virchow's denunciation of me than his
satire--a denunciation which gibbeted me as a confederate in the
social-democratic cause, and which made the theory of descent
answerable for the horrors of the Paris Commune. The opinion is now
widely spread that by this intentional connection of the theory of
descent with Social Democracy he has hit the hardest blow at that
theory, and that he aimed at nothing less than the removal of all
"Darwinists" from their academic chairs and professorships. This is
the inevitable consequence of his demands; for if Virchow insists with
the utmost determination that the theory of descent must not be taught
(because he does not regard it as true), what is to become of the
supporters of that theory who, like myself, regard it as
incontrovertibly true, and teach it as a perfectly sound theory? And
at least nine-tenths of all the teachers of zoology and botany in
Europe are among its supporters from immutable conviction of its
truth, as well as all morphologists without exception. Virchow cannot
expect tha