Sir

The renewed debate (see, for example, ref. 1) about whether the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel 'doctored' his embryo drawings to fit his biogenetic law — ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny — has led to intensified research into other aspects of Haeckel's life and work. One example is the strange story of when he thought he had been awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Haeckel was very disappointed when he heard that this prize had gone to the German philosopher Rudolf Eucken. French and Italian newspapers had announced that Haeckel was to be given the prize, and he had received telegrams and postcards congratulating him. Haeckel thought he deserved the prize, and wrote to a friend, the publisher Wilhelm Breitenbach, on 30 November 1908: “If I were to get the Nobel prize (which in view of my 50 years of work and according to the often expressed views of colleagues might be justified!) I would donate the money to the Phyletic Museum.”

It was particularly irritating for Haeckel to be beaten by Eucken. On 29 December that year, Haeckel wrote (see page 214 of ref. 2) to his friend and biographer, the popular science writer Wilhelm Bölsche: “I heard from Stockholm that there had actually been a kind of competition in the 'Nobel commission' between myself and my colleague Rudolf Eucken. But the latter won as an advocate of idealism and a priest of the 'higher spiritual world', while I as advocate of materialism and slave to the 'lower Nature' had to lose. Eucken is a popular rhetorician and promoter of the Christian religion, but until now he has not brought any new ideas into philosophy.”

Haeckel's belief that he was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature is incorrect (see, for example, ref. 3 — research by U.H. and L.O. in Swedish archives was supported by a grant from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Centre for the History of Science). Among the 16 nominees, the top candidates initially were the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf and the English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, but the Nobel committee could not make up its mind between these two. Eucken was suggested as a compromise solution by Vitalis Norström, professor of philosophy at Gothenburg University, who admired Eucken's philosophical writings4. These were seen as consistent with the terms of Alfred Nobel's will directing that the literature prize should go to a work written “with an idealistic tendency”.

The award of the literature prize to Eucken has been called “the biggest faux pas” in the history of the Nobel prize (see page 63 of ref. 5). Haeckel's conviction that his materialism was unpopular among leading members of the Swedish Academy receives support in a letter dated 27 November 1908 from the historian Harald Hjärne, director of the academy, to the poet and academy member Esaias Tegnér. Hjärne wrote that Eucken was needed “as a counterweight to the demonstrations in support of his Jena colleague Haeckel” (see page 181 of ref. 6) during Uppsala's 1907 bicentennial celebrations for Linnaeus, when a lecture by Haeckel had been enthusiastically received.