Haeckel first read Darwins On the Origin of Species in 1864, a book

that impacted him profoundly. He became was a strong supporter of Darwins

theory of evolution for the rest of his life. Throughout his career, he worked
to promote and publicize Darwins work throughout Germany, his home
country, and even wrote multiple books to support the teaching of evolution
in schools. Haeckel himself was a zoologist and a comparative anatomist that
had always been particularly interested in embryology. He himself is credited
with developing the recapitulation theory, which has since been discredited,
that states that an organisms biological development is a reflection of its
species evolutionary development. Although knowledge of this theory is not
integral to The Evolution of Man, the existence of such a theory shows the
degree to which Haeckel was interested in studying biological and
evolutionary developments.