89. The Bressa Prize

We subsequently learn the following details about the great "Bressa Prize", which was awarded to Professor Ernst Haeckel on January 7 by resolution of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Turin: The prize (worth ten thousand francs) was founded by Dr. Caesar Alexander Bressa in Turin in 1876 and is awarded every four years, alternately to Italian and foreign scholars. The wording of the relevant statute states: "This prize will be intended to reward the scholar or inventor of any nationality who, during the quadrennium 1895-1898, in the judgment of the Academy of Sciences of Turin, will have made the most important and useful invention or published the most solid work in the field of physical and experimental sciences, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, chemistry, physiology and pathology, without excluding geology, history, geography and statistics. - The work should be printed; manuscripts are not accepted. - The Academy will award the prize to the researcher it deems most worthy, even if he has not applied." - In the penultimate bankruptcy, the prize (1892) was awarded to the famous Professor Heinrich Hertz in Bonn, who unfortunately died too early, for his epoch-making discoveries on electricity. Professor Haeckel's work, to which the prize was awarded this time, is not (as some newspapers erroneously stated) his recently published philosophical book on the "Welträtsel", but the three-volume work (published in 1894-1896) on "Systematische Phylogenie, Entwurf eines natürlichen Systems der Organismen auf Grund ihrer Stammesgeschichte". In this work, Haeckel systematically organized and summarized all the studies on the natural development of the organic world with which he had been continuously occupied for forty years - since the publication of Darwin's main work on the "Origin of Species". He had already given a short popular excerpt of this in 1868 in his "Natural History of Creation", the ninth edition of which was published in 1898.