when pro-consul of Africa had to repress a sedition among its inhabitants (Suetonius, Vesp. iv.; Tissot, Fastes de la prov. d’Afrique, p. 66); it was the birthplace of the emperor Albinus. At this period the metropolis of Byzacena was after Carthage the most important town in Roman Africa. It was the seat of a bishopric, and its bishops are mentioned at the councils of 258, 348, 393 and even later. Destroyed by the Vandals in 434 it was rebuilt by Justinian and renamed Justinianopolis (Procop. De aedif. vi. 6). The Arabic invasion at the end of the 7th century destroyed the Byzantine towns, and the place became the haunt of pirates, protected by the Kasbah (citadel); it was built on the substructions of the Punic, Roman and Byzantine acropolis, and is used by the French for military purposes. The Arabic geographer Bakri gave a description of the chief Roman buildings which were standing in his time (Bakri, Descr. de l’Afrique, tr. by de Slane, p. 83 et seq.). The modern town of Susa, despite its commercial prosperity, occupies only a third of the old site.
In 1863 the French engineer, A. Daux, discovered the jetties and the moles of the commercial harbour, and the line of the military harbour (Cothon); both harbours, which were mainly artificial, are entirely silted up. There remains a fragment of the fortifications of the Punic town, which had a total length of 6410 metres, and remains of the substructions of the Byzantine acropolis, of the circus, the theatre, the water cisterns, and of other buildings, notably the interesting Byzantine basilica which is now used as an Arab café (Kahwat-el-Kubba). In the ruins there have been found numerous columns of Punic inscriptions, Roman inscriptions and mosaic, among which is one representing Virgil seated, holding the Aeneid in his hand; another represents the Cretan labyrinth with Theseus and the Minotaur (Héron de Villefosse, Revue de l’Afrique française, v., December 1887, pp. 384 and 394; Comptes rendus de l’Acad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, 1892, p. 318; other mosaics, ibid., 1896, p. 578; Revue archéol., 1897). In 1904 Dr Carton and the abbé Leynaud discovered huge Christian catacombs with several miles of subterranean galleries to which access is obtained by a small vaulted chamber. In these catacombs we find numerous sarcophagi and inscriptions painted or engraved of the Roman and Byzantine periods (Comptes rendus de l’Acad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, 1904–1907; Carton and Leynaud, Les Catacombes d’Hadrumète, Susa, 1905). We can recognize also the Punic and Pagan-Roman cemeteries (C. R. de l’Acad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, 1887; Bull. archéol. du Comité, 1885, p. 149; 1903, p. 157). The town had no Punic coins, but under the Roman domination there were coins from the time of the Republic. These are of bronze and bear the name of the city in abbreviations, Hadr or Hadrvm accompanying the head of Neptune or the Sun. We find also the names of local duumvirs. Under Augustus the coins have on the obverse the imperial effigy, and on the reverse the names and often the effigies of the pro-consuls who governed the province, P. Quintilius Varus, L. Volusius Saturninus and Q. Fabius Maximus Africanus. After Augustus the mint was finally closed.
Authorities.—A. Daux, Recherches sur l’origine et l’emplacement des emporia phéniciens dans le Zeugis et le Byzacium (Paris, 1869); Ch. Tissot, Géographie comparée de la province romaine d’Afrique, ii. p. 149; Cagnat, Explorations archéol. en Tunisie (2nd and 3rd fasc., 1885); Lud. Müller, Numismatique de l’Afrique ancienne, ii p. 51; M. Palat, in the Bulletin arch. du Comité des travaux historiques (1885), pp. 121 and 150; Revue archéologique (1884 and 1897); Bulletin des antiquités africaines (1884 and 1885); Bulletin de la Société archéologique de Sousse (first published in 1903); Atlas archéol. de Tunisie (4th fascicule, with the plan of Hadrumetum). (E. B.*)
HAECKEL, ERNST HEINRICH (1834– ), German biologist,
was born at Potsdam on the 16th of February 1834. He studied
medicine and science at Würzburg, Berlin and Vienna, having
for his masters such men as Johannes Müller, R. Virchow and
R. A. Kölliker, and in 1857 graduated at Berlin as M.D. and
M.Ch. At the wish of his father he began to practise as a doctor
in that city, but his patients were few in number, one reason
being that he did not wish them to be many, and after a short
time he turned to more congenial pursuits. In 1861, at the
instance of Carl Gegenbaur, he became Privatdozent at Jena;
in the succeeding year he was chosen extraordinary professor
of comparative anatomy and director of the Zoological Institute
in the same university; in 1865 he was appointed to a chair
of zoology which was specially established for his benefit. This
last position he retained for 43 years, in spite of repeated invitations
to migrate to more important centres, such as Strassburg
or Vienna, and at Jena he spent his life, with the exception of
the time he devoted to travelling in various parts of the world,
whence in every case he brought back a rich zoological harvest.
As a field naturalist Haeckel displayed extraordinary power and industry. Among his monographs may be mentioned those on Radiolaria (1862), Siphonophora (1869), Monera (1870) and Calcareous Sponges (1872), as well as several Challenger reports, viz. Deep-Sea Medusae (1881), Siphonophora (1888), Deep-Sea Keratosa (1889) and Radiolaria (1887), the last being accompanied by 140 plates and enumerating over four thousand new species. This output of systematic and descriptive work would alone have constituted a good life’s work, but Haeckel in addition wrote copiously on biological theory. It happened that just when he was beginning his scientific career Darwin’s Origin of Species was published (1859), and such was the influence it exercised over him that he became the apostle of Darwinism in Germany. He was, indeed, the first German biologist to give a whole-hearted adherence to the doctrine of organic evolution and to treat it as the cardinal conception of modern biology. It was he who first brought it prominently before the notice of German men of science in his first memoir on the Radiolaria, which was completely pervaded with its spirit, and later at the congress of naturalists at Stettin in 1863. Darwin himself has placed on record the conviction that Haeckel’s enthusiastic propagandism of the doctrine was the chief factor of its success in Germany. His book on General Morphology (1866), published when he was only thirty-two years old, was called by Huxley a suggestive attempt to work out the practical application of evolution to its final results; and if it does not take rank as a classic, it will at least stand out as a landmark in the history of biological doctrine in the 19th century. Although it contains a statement of most of the views with which Haeckel’s name is associated, it did not attract much attention on its first appearance, and accordingly its author rewrote much of its substance in a more popular style and published it a year or two later as the Natural History of Creation (Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte), which was far more successful. In it he divided morphology into two sections—tectology, the science of organic individuality; and promorphology, which aims at establishing a crystallography of organic forms. Among other matters, he laid particular stress on the “fundamental biogenetic law” that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that the individual organism in its development is to a great extent an epitome of the form-modifications undergone by the successive ancestors of the species in the course of their historic evolution. His well-known “gastraea” theory is an outcome of this generalization. He divided the whole animal creation into two categories—the Protozoa or unicellular animals, and the Metazoa or multicellular animals, and he pointed out that while the former remain single-celled throughout their existence, the latter are only so at the beginning, and are subsequently built up of innumerable cells, the single primitive egg-cell (ovum) being transformed by cleavage into a globular mass of cells (morula), which first becomes a hollow vesicle and then changes into the gastrula. The simplest multicellular animal he conceived to resemble this gastrula with its two primary layers, ectoderm and endoderm, and the earliest hypothetical form of this kind, from which the higher animals might be supposed to be actually descended, he called the “gastraea.” This theory was first put forward in the memoir on the calcareous sponges, which in its sub-title was described as an attempt at an analytical solution of the problem of the origin of species, and was subsequently elaborated in various Studies on the Gastraea Theory (1873–1884). Haeckel, again, was the first to attempt to draw up a genealogical tree (Stammbaum) exhibiting the relationship between the various orders of animals
