As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.

Haeckel believed privately that his figures were both exact and synthetic and in public asserted that they were schematic like most figures used in teaching. Rather than being a strict Darwinian Haeckel believed that racial characteristics were acquired through interactions with the environment and that ontogeny directly followed phylogeny. As a book for the general public it followed the common practice of not citing sources.

The publiErnst Haeckeld artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur "Art Forms of Nature"). Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development or ontogeny parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development or phylogeny. Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16 1834 – August 9 1919) was a German biologist naturalist philosopher physician professor and artist who discovered described and named thousands of new species mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology including anthropogeny ecology phylum phylogeny stem cell and the kingdom Protista.