ABSTRACT
Ernst Haeckel and Louis Agassiz may seem strange bedfellows; rarely did they write or say anything complementary about each other — their published (and private) comments notable for their hostility. Nonetheless, Haeckel, the proud German ‘Darwinian’, borrowed a great deal from Agassiz, the archetypical creationist foe, particularly his ideas on the possibilities and potentials of the threefold parallelism: the union of palaeontology, comparative biology (systematics), and ontogeny. Indeed, Haeckel made the threefold parallelism central to his work on ‘reconstructing’ genealogies — while the ever-frustrated Agassiz (privately) complained that evidence from the threefold parallelism was indeed “mein Resultat!” and supported his kind of ‘genealogies’. Agassiz (publicly) discussed his views on Haeckel, especially ‘genealogical’ trees, and the errors within, his critique centering primarily on palaeontology, the extent and usefulness of the fossil record. But lurking in the background of both men’s work was the disturbing evidence of geographical distribution — disturbing, as both saw quite clearly that it, and it alone, could potentially make direct statements concerning the origin of organisms (particularly humans). Haeckel’s understanding of geographical distribution was essentially that of the route map, a science he proposed calling
chorology.
