Haeckel

“I am wholly a child of the nineteenth century, and with its close I would draw the line under my life’s work.” Thus does Professor Haeckel speak of himself. There is a note of gentle resignation in the words, but the time is coming when men will give them a different meaning. Whatever greater achievements may be wrought by a future generation in the service of truth and human welfare, their work will be but a continuation of the truth of our time, as long as humanity breathes. On the intrepid, outstanding figures of the nineteenth century will shine a light that is peculiarly theirs, an illumination that men will dwell on for ever—as we look back, in personal life, on the young days of love. It was a strong love that brought our century to birth.

The soul of humanity has for four centuries been passing through a grim crisis.

Let us imagine ourselves for a moment before the noble painting by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. What art! What utter revelation of the power of man’s mind! But, we ask, what material did the genius of humanity choose in those days for the manifestation of its giant power? The last judgment: the Christ descending at the blare of the last trumpet, to reward the faithful and banish the sinner into everlasting pain: the Almighty, breathing His spirit into Adam, or mystically upbuilding Eve from the rib of the man. There was no “symbolic” intention in the picture; the deepest feeling of hundreds—nay, thousands—of years was embodied in it. The artist merely gave an imperishable external form to the most treasured truth of his time.

Yet, slowly and gradually, what a mighty change has come about!

Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a new side of the earth lies in the violet haze of the dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth roll round the sun through space, by force of some mysterious law. Kepler dreams of the world-harmony that will replace the ever-acting Deity, and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity in the framework of the heavens. Galileo turns his new optic tube to the stars, and at once the heavens are changed, not only for the calculating, mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense: there are jagged peaks on the moon, satellites circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars lying across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings round Saturn. Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament; every “fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore fade from them.

The seventeenth century, opening amid the last glare of the martyr-fires, quickens with a vague yearning and expectation.

In the eighteenth century the old world breaks up. From the new stars, from the new world, new ideas come. On all sides is the crash and roar of conflict. Dread flames break out in the social, moral, and æsthetic life of men. But the century ends in the birth of a greater artist than Michael Angelo.

Goethe, on the morn of the nineteenth century, paints a new Sixtine Chapel in his poetry. But he no longer depicts the old ideas. He speaks of God-Nature. To him God is the eternal force of the All. His thoughts turn no longer on Creation and the Last Judgment. An eternal evolution is the source of his inspiration. He regards the whole universe as a single, immeasurable revelation of spirit. But this spirit is the rhythmic outflow of infinite developments. It becomes Milky Way and sun and planet, blue lotus-flowers and gay butterfly. At last it takes the form of man, and reads the stars as an open book. In Homer and Goethe it directs the style and the pen; in Michael Angelo and Raphael it guides the pencil and the brush.

All this unfolds in Goethe, as in a vision with yet half-opened eyes.

Then the nineteenth century begins. Nature is its salvation, the salvation of its most practical, most real need. It must struggle for its existence, like any other century, but it has new and improved weapons for the struggle. All the earlier ages were but poor blunderers. The lightning flashed on the naked savage, and he fell on his knees and prayed, powerless as he was. In the eighteenth century it dawned on men’s minds that this might be some force of nature. The nineteenth century sets its foot on the neck of the demon of this force, presses him into its service, plays with him. Its thoughts and words flash along the lightning current, as if along new nerve-tracks, that begin to circle the globe. Man becomes lord of the earth, from the uppermost azure down into the dark, cold abysses of the ocean, from the icy pole to the burning tropical desert. And at length man turns his thoughts upon himself.

Man, his arm resting on the splendid instruments of modern research, raises his hand to his brow, and turns philosopher. He becomes at once more bold and more modest than ever.

What Goethe had seen in vision rises before him now in sharp, almost hard outline from his own real life-work. He has succeeded in bringing nature and its forces to his feet, because it was flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood. He is its child. A thousand tongues proclaim the truth to him, a naïve, almost simple, revelation of reality. He digs in the earth, and ancient bones and skulls tell him vaguely of the past. Such once was he, devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal world. He searches his frame through and through for further light. There is the brain, where the thoughts crowd together. There is the cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that so closely resembles the lowest of all living things, not yet distinct enough to be either animal or plant. Here are the forms that he successively assumes in his mother’s body, before he is born—forms that can hardly be distinguished from those of the animal at the same stage of development. From almost divine heights he has sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell—nay, deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled matter of the universe.

But this early picture dissolves at once in an ennobling and inspiring truth. Nature becomes man. In this he presses once more to the heart of the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang of God-Nature. The new God pulses in every wave of man’s blood. In Michael Angelo’s picture God breathes his spirit into Adam. The new Adam of the nineteenth century is God’s spirit, in body and soul, from the very first, for he is Nature. He needs no more. When he looks up to the shining stars, he looks into the eyes of God and his own. He has come down from those stars like the bright dew in which they are now mirrored. He belongs to them, but they also are in him. All-Nature: and he is a part of Nature. All-development: and he is a phase of the development.

That is the great philosophical dream of the nineteenth-century worker. His hand is black with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the light of the stars and of the world.

No one can understand the greatness of a man like Ernst Haeckel who has not learned this melody. Nature is not a flat surface: it is an ocean. When Columbus crossed the seas in his three frail barques long ago to seek a new world in the distant haze, he little dreamed that the gray waters buried other new worlds a thousand yards beneath his keel—worlds of the deep-sea, into which our age has slowly dipped with its dredges. So we in turn may run our eye over the blue surface of nature, and think of its mysterious gold-lands and spice-islands, without suspicion of all that outspreads beneath our keel. Yet that glorious day on which Columbus found “his land” is an inspiration to us, his remote grandchildren. The life we are going to examine will bring before us such a morning of discovery. Columbus went in quest of Zipangu (as he called Japan), and he found America. Not one of us, however gifted he be, can be quite sure that, in leading humanity, he is not sailing into another such heroic error. Let us say that at once to all, friends and opponents. America or Zipangu—let it be so. Perhaps any man might have found Zipangu, while only the genius could reach America.

When Gustav Freytag, who had a most happy quality for writing memoirs, was composing his admirable Pictures from the Past of Germany, he sought in each period some prominent man of plain and downright character, yet who had something typical of his age in his sentiments, as if the time-spirit spoke through him. In this quest he twice (in the fourth volume, for the period from the close of the eighteenth century to the Wars of Freedom) lit upon earlier members of Haeckel’s family. The first was Haeckel’s grandfather on the mother’s side, Christoph Sethe; the second was his father, Councillor Haeckel.

This simple fact shows the stuff of Haeckel’s race. The older Sethe was an important man in his time. He left to his children manuscript memoirs of his eventful life, which have, unfortunately, been only sparsely used by Freytag, though the whole deserved to be regarded as a source of history. The general facts in relation to him were collected by Hermann Hüffer, who was not merely interested in the jurist because he was one himself, but was brought into touch with him as a result of his brilliant study of Heine. Sethe’s eldest son, Christian, the uncle of Ernst Haeckel, is the well-known friend of Heine’s youth to whom the poet dedicated the “Fresco-sonnets” in his Book of Songs and wrote the finest of his early letters. This Christian Sethe (he died on May 31, 1857, being then Provincial Director of Revenue at Stettin), was a lawyer, like his father, and the father himself came of a legal family. Haeckel’s own father, moreover, the husband of one of Christian’s sisters, was a State Councillor at the time of his death, and his elder brother was a Provincial Councillor. Thus Haeckel’s genealogical tree spreads into the legal profession in a curiously complex way.

We naturally reflect for a moment if we could fancy Haeckel himself as a lawyer. It is hardly possible. He would at least have been a very rebellious member of the profession, and have been sadly lacking in respect for the venerable traditions and powdered wigs of the court—assuming, of course (which a mere layman has no right to question), that there ought still to be such traditions and costumes in the profession. In his vigorous Riddle of the Universe he has, from his scientific point of view, brought strictures against the legal profession that leave nothing to be desired in the way of candour, when we recollect the long tradition of his family. In its lingering in the rear of the progress of the times the whole science of law seemed to him to be a “riddle of the universe.” The jurist is apt to be respected as an embodiment of our highest culture. In reality that is not the case. The distinctive object of his concern, man and his soul, is only superficially studied in the preparation for the law, and so we still find amongst jurists the most extraordinary views as to the freedom of the will, responsibility, and so on. “Most of our legal students pay no attention to anthropology, psychology, and evolution, the first requisites for a correct appreciation of human nature. They ‘have no time’ for it. It is unfortunately all absorbed in a profound study of beer and wine and the ‘noble art’ of fencing; and the rest of their valuable time is taken up in learning some hundreds of paragraphs from the books of law, the knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the jurist to fill any position whatever in the State.”

The student of psychology, however, cannot fail to see that the disposition that led so many members of Haeckel’s family into the legal profession was also developed in himself to some extent. There is perhaps no other scientist of his time with such an imperious craving for clearness, for clean lines and systematic arrangement. At least in the whole of the Darwinian period no other has made so great an effort to convert the scattered flight of phenomena in the realm of life into the even course of so many fixed “laws.” In many of his writings this tendency to formulate laws is so pronounced that the layman instinctively has an impression of dogmatism on the part of the author. This has been grossly misunderstood, and made to play an important part in the controversial work of his opponents. The truth is that this sharp outlook and pronounced tendency to formulate clear and unambiguous “laws” in the animal and plant worlds is a matter of temperament as much as of judgment. It is very possible that we have here an hereditary trait, an innate aversion for disorder and confusion—for a thoughtless rushing ahead without clear ideas and plan. The trait was the more important and helpful as a man of Haeckel’s type was sure to be one of the most active revolutionaries in his science, even apart from Darwinian ideas. It would be difficult to find another reformer in any great province of thought who, immediately after effecting a complete overthrow of the older ideas, has hastened so quickly to build up the new, to devise a nomenclature and a classification down to the smallest details, and hand on at once to his successors a splendid order once more. Zoology, which seemed to crumble into chaos after Darwin’s victory and the collapse of the old framework, came out of Haeckel’s hands, after barely two years’ work, in the shape of a new and graceful Darwinistic structure—not, indeed, perfect and finally completed, but entirely habitable for the young generation. They could add new stones as they thought fit, or pierce new windows, and so on; but at all events the chaos was terminated at a critical moment by this iron man of order. I will only add, to complete the picture, that one of the three doctorates that Haeckel holds to-day is that of law (an honorary degree), in addition to his qualifications in philosophy and medicine. He now only lacks the theological degree, but I fear that he will neither take the trouble to secure it nor have it conferred on him as an honorary distinction for his merit in that department.

The Sethes and Haeckels of the earlier generation were not merely zealous jurists, but also characteristic figures of Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic Prussia. Christoph Sethe, the patriarch of the maternal line, was Privy Councillor of the Prussian Government at Cleve at the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century, though he was then young. When the French occupied the country he accompanied the Government to Münster, in 1802, which had become a Prussian town. But the stalwart German was pursued even there by the detested Napoleonists. He was sent to Düsseldorf as General Procurator in 1808, and came into dangerous conflict with the French authorities shortly before the Emperor’s fall. The mobilisation of the troops for the campaign of 1812 had led to a disturbance amongst the workers. Sethe’s sense of patriotism and justice was affronted by the arbitrary proceedings of the French. He was summoned to give an account at Paris, the chief object being to retain him—the most powerful official in the Rhine district and not a very safe man—as a hostage during the crisis. It was at Paris that he made the finest phrase of his life. Roederer, the minister, tried to intimidate him with the threat that the Emperor might have a dangerous man like him shot at any moment. “You will have to shoot the law first,” replied Sethe. We are often reminded of this saying in the biography of Sethe’s grandson. If Haeckel had been burned at the stake like Giordano Bruno, he would have thought of nothing but the “law”—the law of truth and freedom that they would burn with him.

Christoph Sethe continued to play an important part in the service of Prussia, to which, of course, he returned, together with the Rhinelands, after Napoleon’s fall. He was destined to live through the terrible reaction under Frederic William the Third, and the fiery outburst under his successor. After the early death of his wife their youngest daughter, Bertha, managed his house and large family.

She lived until her death (April 1, 1904) in her quiet, unpretentious home in one of the large empty streets behind the Tiergarten at Berlin, reaching the age of ninety-two, but never losing her freshness of mind and memory. In my many happy talks with the aged lady the succeeding periods seemed to melt together. The small, old furniture and the ancient, ever-ticking clock made me forget, in dreamy twilight hours, that the red glare in the sky above the houses beyond, that faintly lit up the old-time room, was the reflection from the twentieth century of the electric flames that flashed on the great modern city. On the table lay the latest part of Haeckel’s (her nephew) fine illustrated work for artistically minded scientists and scientifically minded artists—the Art-forms in Nature. The dear old lady spoke with pride of her knowledge of the “radiolaria,” the mysterious unicellular ocean-dwellers, described in Haeckel’s splendid monograph, the flinty shells of which are amongst the finest artistic treasures of nature. She called them the “dear radiolaria” with all the tenderness of the emotional man of science who had felt a sort of psychic relation, a living affinity, to the tiny microscopic strangers he had been the first to arrange and describe in their thousands. Smiling, with quiet pride, she told me how her nephew visited her, when he came to Berlin; how, with the unassuming ways of this sound stock, he chose to sleep in the clothes-drying loft; how he invited his friends to come and hear of his voyages and work, bringing thirty of them to share a single dish of herring-salad in his naïve way, and how, as they continued to pour in, he made seats for them of boards and tubs, and fed them with his wonderful genius for anecdote so that none went away fasting. She dwelt with entire satisfaction on the last, the “zoological” phase, of the Haeckel-Sethe house. Yet it all blended softly with the old and the past of nearly a century ago. Over the patriarchal furniture hung the oil painting of Christoph Sethe, with the large Roman nose that runs through the family down to Ernst Haeckel himself, and gives the chief feature to his otherwise soft profile. Under a glass shade, in the old fashion of our grandfathers that we perhaps do not sufficiently appreciate, was a fine bust of Schleiermacher. He was a friend of the Sethes. Bertha Sethe was confirmed by him. He died four days before Ernst Haeckel was born, on February 12, 1834. The sister came from the grave to attend the mother of the new-born child. A little fact of that character seems to pour out a broad stream of light. The religious sense was strong in the Sethes, but it was not of the rigid conventional character. It came from the depths of human destinies, of individual experience. In those depths it is always found associated with that other fundamental quality of human experience and inner life—a zeal for the truth. Schleiermacher, the Good, had endeavoured within the limits of his time (if not of our time) to erect a new and firmer Christendom. Darwinism might very well have adjusted itself to this new Christendom, that needed no record of miracles from disputed historical works to support it, but sought the holiest ideal prophetically in the symbolic conception and the development of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Had Schleiermacher read the Natural History of Creation, or later theologians shared his temper, one wonders how much exaggeration and bitterness might have been spared on either side. But religion was not prepared to dissociate itself from “the Church,” and with the Church there could be no compromise. Thus one’s thoughts travelled from the radiolaria in Haeckel’s latest publication and the old bust of Schleiermacher, which was protected by its glass shade, in this home of old-world piety, from the wicked flies of the twentieth century.

An elder sister of Bertha Sethe and daughter of the old Christoph Sethe had married the much older lawyer, Karl Haeckel, in the twenties. The first-fruit of this marriage was Ernst Haeckel’s elder brother, the Provincial Councillor Haeckel who died a few years ago, a high-minded and sensitive man. He remained throughout life faithful to the strict traditional forms of religious experience, in spite of all his admiration for his gifted zoological brother.

The second and last child did not appear until ten years later. Ernst Haeckel was born on the 16th of February, 1834, shortly after the death of Schleiermacher, as I have explained. Most of what I know of his earliest years was told me by his venerable aunt Bertha.

His father died long ago, in 1871. Gustav Freytag has pointed out how eagerly he drank in the morning air of the dawning freedom before 1813. For many years he was at a later date a very close friend of Gneisenau. He was an earnest, conscientious, upright man, with no particular artistic arabesques to his life, and at the same time no errors. The victories of 1870 lit up the red sunset of his days. He was one of those happy folk who thought that all was accomplished in the great achievements of those days, and had little suspicion of what was still to come. The mother survived him for many years. Her son’s Indian Travels was dedicated to her on her eighty-fourth birthday, November 22, 1882. The dedication ran: “Thou it was who from early childhood fostered in me a sense for the infinite beauties of nature: thou hast ever watched my changeful career with all the ceaseless care and thought that we compress in the one phrase—a mother’s love.”

Ernst Haeckel was born at Potsdam, but in the same year the father was transferred to Merseburg, where the child was brought up. It was not his destiny to be a child of Berlin. Saxony remained essentially his home in many respects. We can always see in him something of this home that looks down on its children from its great green hills. The cold lines of the streets of the metropolis and the melancholy of the Brandenburg pine-forests cannot be traced in him. In later years Berlin assumed more and more in his thoughts the shape of an antipodal city. His works are full of the sharpest strictures on Berlin science. It was at an earlier date the city of Ehrenberg and Reichert, whom he did not love; later it was associated with Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, who gradually became his bitterest opponents. But he detested it generally as the home of Privy Councillors, of science in the Procrustean bed of official supervision. When he compared what he himself had done at Jena with the slenderest possible appliances, and what, in his judgment, had been done by the heads of the Berlin schools in their princely institutes, he would humorously—though it has been taken very seriously—lay down the “natural law” that the magnitude of the scientific achievement is in inverse proportion to the size of the scientific institute. The official people at Berlin did not fail to make a biting retort to these Radical strictures—that in 1881, when he wanted to go to Ceylon, he was formally refused assistance by the Berlin Academy from the travelling-fee (then at liberty) attached to the Humboldt foundation. He made the journey without their assistance, and had the splendid revenge of giving us, in the description of this very voyage, the most brilliant account of the tropics that has appeared in Germany since the time of Humboldt. It was a finer contribution to the general ideal of the Humboldt foundation than the timid payment of a hundred pounds could have secured. However, we are anticipating. Before that time he was to spend a short but happy period at Berlin in the fifties, in the best days of his youth—a Berlin of a different scientific character from the present city, being at once less pretentious and more profound, whichever the reader chooses to dwell on.

Certain traits could be recognised unmistakably in the boy. He had a great love of nature, of light, colour, and beauty, of flowers and trees and butterflies, of the sun and the blue heavens. There was also a strong sense of independence and individuality. This did not imply that he was lacking in gentler feeling. It is said that he would do anything that he was asked but nothing that it was sought to compel him to do. The little fair, blue-eyed lad would sit quietly if they gave him a daisy to pull to pieces. First he would, as if he were a student analysing it, detach the white leaves from the central yellow ground. Then he would carefully replace them, piece by piece, round the yellow centre, clap his little hands and cry out, “Now it’s all right again.” It is a very pretty trait that tradition has preserved. In the play of the child we seem to see the chief lines of the man’s character like two branches of a tree; the analytic work of the scientist and the reconstructive tendency of the artist who restores the dissected world to harmony.

His excellent training in those early years fostered his feeling for nature and his sense of independence with wise adaptation to the personal character of the boy. The mother gladly cultivated his love of nature. On the deeper development of his character a decisive influence was exercised, with every regard for freedom, by a friend of the family, the physician Basedow. His ideal was education without compulsion, by means of a sort of constant artificial selection and cultivation of the good that grew up spontaneously in the soul of the child. The father, a great worker, was content to give a word of praise occasionally; to urge him to go to the root of things always, and never to coquet idly with his own soul. If the young dreamer stood at the window and looked up at the clouds, his father would pat him on the shoulder and say, “Every minute has its value in this world. Play or work—but do something.” It was, in a sense, the voice of the restless nineteenth century itself that spoke. The whole life of the youth and the man was to be an eternal proof that he had heard the message. He has pressed unwearyingly forward, as few other men have done. There was ever something in him of the mountaineer, hurrying on and watching every hour that he may reach the summit. The day of rest may come afterwards, down below in the valley. In truth, it never came. It is well known that the man wrote some of his most difficult, most widely read, and most controverted works subsequently in a few months, encroaching upon his night’s rest until his health was endangered. In a remote Cingalese village in Ceylon, where the enervating tropical climate forces even the strongest to indulge in the afternoon siesta, he tells himself that, in view of the great expense of the journey, each day is worth a five-pound note. He refuses to sleep long hours or take the siesta, rises at five in the morning, and uses the hottest hours of the day, from twelve to four, for “anatomical and microscopic work, observing and drawing, and for packing up the material collected.” He met to the full the claim of the nineteenth century, for all the inner poetic tendency of his character. Such a character he must have had to become a philosopher, as he has done; but it lay, as it were, in deeper recesses of his being. To the eye of the observer he seemed to be ever rushing on with a watch in his hand until old age. When we think of the enormous number of problems and the vast range of interests that brought him into the front rank in the nineteenth century, we may say that he advanced at a pace that would have given concern to the aged adviser of his youth in his small world.

In the long run we may say of all education as of the physician in the old saying, “The best doctor is the one we don’t need, because we are not ill.” Haeckel was sent to the school at Merseburg. This instruction came to a close in his eighteenth year. He thought of some of his old teachers with affection forty years afterwards. On the whole his later opinion of the usual schooling was as severe as that of many of his contemporaries. In his General Morphology (1866), his most profound work, he speaks of the “very defective, perverse, and often really mischievous instruction, by which we are filled with absurd errors, instead of natural truths, in our most impressionable years.” Sixteen years afterwards (in a speech delivered at Eisenach) he hopes that the triumphant science of evolution “will put an end to one of the greatest evils in our present system of education—that overloading of the memory with dead material that destroys the finest powers, and prevents the normal development of either mind or body.” “This overloading,” he says, “is due to the old and ineradicable error that the excellence of education is to be judged by the quantity of positive facts committed to memory, instead of by the quality of the real knowledge imparted. Hence it is especially advisable to make a more careful selection of the matter of instruction both in the higher and the elementary schools, and not to give precedence to the faculties that burden the memory with masses of dead facts, but to those that build up the judgment with the living play of the idea of evolution. Let our tortured children learn only half what they do, but learn it better, and the next generation will be twice as sound as the present one in body and soul. The reform of education, which, we trust, will be brought about by introducing the idea of evolution, must apply to the mathematical and scientific, as well as the philological and historical sections, because there is the same fault in them all, that far too much material is injected, and far too little attention is paid to its digestion.” Seventeen years later again, in the Riddle of the Universe, the elementary schools are severely handled. Science is still the Cinderella of the code. Our teachers regard it as their chief duty to impart “the dead knowledge that has come down from the schools of the Middle Ages. They give the first place to their grammatical gymnastics, and waste time in imparting a ‘thorough knowledge’ of the classical tongues and foreign history.” There is no question of cosmology, anthropology, or biology; instead of these “the memory is loaded with a mass of philological and historical facts that are quite useless either from the theoretical or the practical point of view.” In these expressions, which recur constantly throughout the whole of a thoughtful life, we can clearly see a very intense general experience of youth, and this is a more valuable document than any individualised complaint against this or that bad teacher in particular.

However, Haeckel (who, in point of fact, took everything seriously and would have all in the clearest order) made a very thorough appropriation of his Latin and Greek. When the new Darwinian zoology and botany needed several hundred new Latin-Greek technical terms in after-years, he showed himself to be an inventor of the first rank in this department. No other scientist has made anything like the same adroit use of the classic vocabulary for the purposes of the new system and created a new terminology for the entirely new science. His creations were certainly ingenious, and not without grace at times; in other cases, as was almost inevitable, they were less pleasing. And to this we must add thousands of names of new species which he had to coin, as the discoverer of radiolaria, medusæ, sponges, &c. In the radiolaria alone he has formed and published the names of more than 3,500 new species. I fancy that even the oldest pastor of the most fertile congregation has never conducted so many christenings. In each case it was necessary to impose two names, the generic and specific. We may well expect to find a few that will not last, but the reader is amazed at the philological creative power of this busy godfather and the inexhaustibility of his vocabulary; they show far more than the usual training in humanities.

His real predilection was pronounced enough in those early years. It was what the classical pedagogue would regard as child’s play and waste of time—zoology and botany. A large double window in his parents’ house was fitted up as a conservatory, and plants were gathered very zealously. His love of botany was so great that any one would have pronounced him a botanist in the making. But fate determined that he was to be a zoologist. In his eleventh year the boy, while paying a visit to his uncle Bleek (a professor of theology!) at Bonn, spent a whole day searching the remotest corners of the Siebengebirg for the Erica cinerea, which he had heard could not be found in any other part of Germany. At the Merseburg school he had two excellent teachers, Gandtner and Karl Gude, who fostered his inclination, and changed it from a mere collector’s eagerness into the finer enjoyment of the scientific mind. The young student wrote a contribution to Garcke’s Flora Hallensis. The professional decision gives many a troubled hour.

It is significant to find that as the novice tended his herbarium it dawned on him that there was a weak point somewhere in the rigid classification given in the manuals of botany. The books said that there were so many fixed species, each invariably recognisable by certain characters. But when the youth tried to diagnose his plant-treasures in practice by these rules, there seemed to be always a few contraband species smuggled in, like the spectres in the Wahlpurgis night to which the sage vainly expostulates, “Begone: we have explained you away.” Often the individual specimens would not agree with the lore of the books. There were discrepancies; sometimes they cut across one type, sometimes another, and at times they shamelessly stretched across the gap between one rubric and another. What did it mean? Were there really no fixed species? Was “species” only an idea, and was the reality of the plant-world in a state of flux like the sea? Teachers and books insisted that the “species” is, in its absolute nature, the basis of all botanical science, the great and sacred foundation that the Moses of botany and zoology, Linné, had laid down for ever. How could it be so?

The mature worker would look back on this dilemma of his youth with a smile of satisfaction thirty years afterwards. He would know then what sort of a nut it was that he was trying to crack in his early speculations. It was nothing less than the magnificent problem that presented itself to Darwin, the crucial question of the fixity or variability of species. “The problem of the constancy or transmutation of species,” he wrote, “arrested me with a lively interest when, twenty years ago, as a boy of twelve years, I made a resolute but fruitless effort to determine and distinguish the ‘good and bad species’ of blackberries, willows, roses, and thistles. I look back now with fond satisfaction on the concern and painful scepticism that stirred my youthful spirits as I wavered and hesitated (in the manner of most ‘good classifiers,’ as we called them) whether to admit only ‘good’ specimens into my herbarium and reject the ‘bad,’ or to embrace the latter and form a complete chain of transitional forms between the ‘good species’ that would make an end of all their ‘goodness.’ I got out of the difficulty at the time by a compromise that I can recommend to all classifiers. I made two collections. One, arranged on official lines, offered to the sympathetic observer all the species, in ‘typical’ specimens, as radically distinct forms, each decked with its pretty label; the other was a private collection, only shown to one trusted friend, and contained only the rejected kinds that Goethe so happily called ‘the characterless or disorderly races, which we hardly dare ascribe to a species, as they lose themselves in infinite varieties,’ such as rubus, salix, verbascum, hieracium, rosa, cirsium, &c. In this a large number of specimens, arranged in a long series, illustrated the direct transition from one good species to another. They were the officially forbidden fruit of knowledge in which I took a secret boyish delight in my leisure hours.”

These little scruples, however, did not interfere with what he felt to be the chief interest of botany. The collecting of plants harmonises well with a general love of nature and a passion for wandering over hill and valley. Long walks had already become a feature of his life. The scientific interest made it superfluous to have a companion. Botany went with him everywhere as his lady-love, and remained ever faithful to him. “I have preferred to travel alone most of my life,” he used to say to me; “I never feel ennui when I am alone. My love of and interest in nature are much better entertainment than conversation.” One of the features in this interest at all times, even in later years, was botanical research. The material for it is found everywhere. Darwin, a great traveller with an unusually strong appreciation of good scenery, has said that the traveller who would combine the pursuit of knowledge with æsthetic satisfaction must be above all a botanist(in the closing retrospect of his Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World, one of the finest passages in the work). Whenever Haeckel spoke in later years of his adopted Jena, he never failed to explain, amongst the other excellent qualities of the little university town, that so many fine orchids grew in its woods. When he left Jena to make the long voyage to Ceylon, his last look was at the drops of dew that sparkled like pearls “in the dark blue calices of the gentians, with their tender lashes, that so richly decked the grass-covered sides of the railway cutting.” The Letters from India, that described his voyage, owes a good deal of its peculiar charm to his skill in botanical description. I know no other work that approaches it in conveying so effective an idea of the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics.

In those early years there was one particular point of close union between botany and the sense of beauty. It was only two years before Haeckel’s birth that Goethe, the man who had put into inimitable verse new and pregnant truths of botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.

It is no longer a special distinction of any prominent personality of the nineteenth century to have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind of natural necessity from which one cannot escape. All that is great in the century can be traced back to Goethe. He flows beneath it, like a dark stream through the bowels of a mountain. Here and there the flanks open and the stream becomes visible; not a restless bubbling spring, but a broad mirror. There is, however, a closer following of Goethe. There are a few strong spirits that have been consciously inspired by him from the first in all their thoughts; have throughout life felt themselves to be the apostles of the “gospel of Goethe”; and in every new creation of their own have held that they did but reflect or expand his ideas, did but carry on his principles to these further conclusions. Haeckel is, in his whole work, one of this smaller band; his whole personality is, in fact, one of its most conspicuous manifestations in the second half of the century.

In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philosophy. Goethe took from him his God, and gave him a new one: took from him the external, transcendental God of the Churches, and gave him the God that is in all things, in the eternal development of the world, in body and soul alike, the God that embraces all reality and being, beside whom there is no distinct “world,” no distinct “sinful man,” no special beginning or end of things. When Haeckel found himself, at the highest point of his own path, by the side of Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that Darwin was but a stage in the logical development of Goethe’s ideas.

Fate decided that Haeckel should be even externally in some sense an heir of the Goethe epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had regarded with such affection, and at which Schiller had toiled with his heart’s blood in “sad, splendid years,” owes its fame in the last third of the century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of adulation, but a simple truth, to say that among the general public and abroad the reputation of Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte to Haeckel. His name stands for an epoch in the life of Jena, like theirs; all that lies between is forgotten and unknown. In the district itself it is as if the old epochs and the new came into direct touch.

I shall never forget the hour when this thought came upon me in all its force. It was on a snowless December day, when the dying fire of autumn still lingered on the trees and bushes where the blackbirds sang in front of the observatory. The table and seat of sandstone stood out bleakly. A tablet indicated, in phrases of Goethe’s, that Schiller had dwelt there. It was there that the Wallenstein was born. There the two often sat in conversation—the conversation of two of the greatest minds of the time, each in his way a master spirit. To-day the little dome of the observatory looks down on the spot; it is not a luxurious building, but it is a stage in the onward journey, a symbol of the nineteenth century as it leaps into the twentieth. A little farther off rises the modern structure of the Zoological Institute. In Goethe’s day no one dreamed that such a building would ever be seen. It was opened by Haeckel in 1884. The zoological collection it houses was chiefly brought together under his direction. Amongst its treasures are, besides Haeckel’s corals and the like, the outcome of the travels of Semon and Kükenthal in Australia and New Guinea—lands whose very outline could barely be traced in the mist when Schiller was a professor at Jena. At the entrance there are two stuffed orangs, our distant cousins. One wall of the lecture-hall is covered with huge charts depicting the genealogical tree of life, as it is drawn up by Haeckel. With what eyes Schiller would have devoured them! Yet classic traits are not wanting. From Haeckel’s fine study in the Institute the eye falls on the Hausberg, “the mountain-top from which the red rays stream.” It is the room in which the deep-sea radiolaria of the Challenger Expedition were studied, a zoological campaign in depths of the ocean that were stranger to Schiller’s days than the surface of the moon is to us. Behind this Goethe-Schiller seat at the observatory there is a natural depression full of willows that reminds us of the time when all was country here. But just beyond it is a modern street—“Ernst Haeckel Street,” as it was named, in honour of him, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Close to it is the villa where he has lived for many years with his devoted family, full of wonderful reminiscences (oil-paintings and water-colours from his own hand) of his many travels. In Schiller’s day a voyage to Ceylon would have been a life’s work. To-day it is an episode in an infinitely richer and broader life. On the stone seat now we see the proud and handsome figure of the man himself, recalling pleasantly the masters who have stood here before him, the wide hat covering the white hair that is belied by the rosy cheeks; a straight and strong figure, yet revealing in the finer lines of the face the sensitive, æsthetic temper that does not look on scientific investigation as a brutal power of the dissecting knife, but remembers he is the heir of Goethe, even in the Zoological Institute yonder. Over my mind came the feeling of a strange rebirth of things. I felt that life is an eternally new and mystic resurrection, immeasurably more wonderful and profound than all the crude ideas of resurrection that have yet prevailed. A mind such as we love to picture to ourselves in our ideal of the future historian must seek the eternal and constant features in all change, even in two epochs that are so distinct and in the men who have lived in them. It is our incorrigible schoolmaster disposition that divides things. In the real world there must be one straight line of development. To-day the highest is sought in the melody of immortal verse: to-morrow a Zoological Institute rises on the spot where the poet had stood.

It is said that the boy did not come under the influence of Goethe without some difficulty. His mother did not like Goethe; she preferred Schiller. Goethe was too great for every true soul to follow him in his arduous path. Weimar itself had more than once been disposed to desert him. How much more the general public in its conventional fetters! How many fell away from him when he published the Roman Elegies, and again when he brought out the Elective Affinities. In Haeckel’s youth people remembered Börne’s narrow and hostile strictures. Goethe began to penetrate into the German family as a classic in spite of the general feeling. But the German family was still far below him. He had gradually to lift it up from its Philistine level. At times it rebelled against him, as every stubborn level does against a peak. It was his aunt Bertha that first put Goethe’s works into the boy’s hands. He received them as a delightful piece of moral contraband.

Gottfried Keller has finely described, about the same period, in his Green Henry, the effect of such a revelation on a sensitive young man. A bookseller brings to the house the whole of Goethe’s works, fifty small volumes with red covers and gilded titles. The young Swiss Heinrich, Keller’s picture of himself, reads the volumes unceasingly for thirty days, when they are taken away because his mother cannot pay for them. But the thirty days have been a dream to the boy. He seems to see new and more brilliant stars in the heavens as he looks up. When the books are removed, it is as if a choir of bright angels have left the room. “I went out into the open air. The old town on the hill, the rocks and woods and river and sea and the lines of the mountains lay in the gentle light of the March sun, and as my eye fell on them I felt a pure and lasting joy that I had never known before. It was a generous love of all that lives, a love that respects the right and realises the import of each thing, and feels the connectedness and depth of the world. This love is higher than the artificial affection of the individual with selfish aim that ever leads to pettiness and caprice; it is higher even than the enjoyment and detachment that come of special and romantic affections; it alone can give us an unchanging and lasting glow. Everything now came before me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms. I began to see and to love, not only the outer form, but the inner content, the nature, and the history of things.” The poet compresses his experience into one episode. In real life it comes slowly, step by step. In fine, a third element was born in the young botanist and lover of beauty—Goethe’s view of life behind all else: that which Goethe himself called “objective.” The mystic might call it a return to God: but it was Goethe’s God.

Three other books influenced Haeckel in his school-days, besides the works of Goethe. The first was Humboldt’s Aspects of Nature. This is another work that has had an effect on all the sensitive spirits of the nineteenth century. It is most unjustly depreciated by the young, blasé generation of our time, which dislikes the older style. In the first two volumes of the Cosmos we see the play of a great mind wherever we look for it.

Then came Darwin’s Naturalist’s Voyage round the World. The ardent youth had as yet on suspicion what the name would one day mean to him. Darwin was then regarded as a completed work on which final judgment had been rendered. He was appreciated as a traveller, a student of the geology of South America, and especially as the gifted investigator of the wonderful coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. His name stood thus in all the manuals, close even to that of Humboldt. Probably the young reader thought he had died long before. At all events, no one had a presentiment that this quiet naturalist and student of corals was about to light a torch that would flame over the world. The chief advantage that Haeckel drew from the two works was an ardent desire to see the tropics, with their virgin forests and blue coral seas. It has come to so many after reading these works, and persisted in their lives as the vivid image of a dream, like that which drove Goethe to Italy—the dream of a home of the soul that must one day be sought.

The third book was Schleiden’s The Plant and its Life. Matthias Jacob Schleiden was then in the best of his power, and had an influence that amounted to fascination on many of the younger men. Behind him lay a terrible struggle. He had begun his career as a lawyer, and had been so unfortunate that he even attempted his life. With his interest in botany a new life began, and he worked with the energy of one raised from the dead. He was certainly an original thinker. His name is known to us to-day especially as the founder of the cell-theory. This is the greatest distinction that he has earned. But at that time he had a much more general importance as a leader in the struggle to introduce a certain method of scientific research. A somewhat obscure epoch was coming to a close, a more or less superficial natural philosophy having sought to replace sound investigation. The struggle had ended with the decisive victory of the simple discovery of facts. There was everywhere a vague feeling that the progress of science was best secured by a bald enumeration and registration of bones, of the joints in the limbs of insects, or of pollen-filaments, rather than by the romantic and spirited leaps of natural philosophy over all the real problems into the heavens above. The question now arose whether this narrow method really exhausted the nature of things; whether scientific specialism, with its laurels of victory, would not prove in the end an equally dangerous enemy. What was “better” for the time being might be very far from really “good.” It was here that Schleiden stepped in. He fought against the prevailing specialism, at first in his own particular province of botany. He did not, indeed, take up the cause of the exploded pyrotechnics of the older natural philosophy, but pleaded for more general critical-philosophical methods. These must be preserved in any circumstances. The great botanist, he said, is not the man who can determine ten thousand species of plants according to the received models, but the man of clear logic and wide deductions from his lore. Botany must be conceived as a distinct branch of general thought; otherwise it is worthless, and its herbarium may rot unnoticed in the corner and its discoveries be the outcome of blind hazard. Schleiden himself had no perception of the great idea that Darwin was to bring into his province afterwards—the idea of the variability of species and of evolution, which brought to a critical stage the question whether the botanist was to be merely a subordinate museum-secretary or a creative thinker, a prophet of nature to whom plants would be part of a general philosophy, a part of God in the ideal sense of evolution. Yet Schleiden’s simple warning cry made a deep impression on many of the young men especially. There was a note of aspiration in it, an assurance that they were waiting for a sun that must rise somewhere. He was a master of language. There was the stuff of the poet in him. His works strayed out far beyond the range of his own province. Haeckel himself did the same work in later years. It is no wonder that Schleiden had a magical influence over him. In this case, indeed, it seemed as if the attraction was to determine his own career.

Schleiden taught botany at Jena University. Haeckel was still in the higher forms of his school at Merseburg, and remained there when his father resigned his position in the State service, and eventually removed to Berlin. At this time the ardent botanist decided to adopt the science of plants as his life-study when his final examination was over. Schleiden would teach him how to combine philosophy with botany. Then he would try to roam over the world as a practical botanist and visit the far-off zones where Mother Earth poured out her cornucopia of forms so generously.

While still in the higher form at school he made a preliminary visit to Jena. Everything seemed so pleasant and charming. He made the journey on foot. These long walks have always been his pride—to start out like a travelling scholar, with hardly anything in his pocket, to live on bread and water, and sleep in the hay at night; but to enjoy to the full all the incomparable delights that the great magician, nature, provides for the faithful novice—scenery, beautiful orchids, thoughts of God, Goethe, and the world. It was in 1849 that he visited Jena. He has described it himself: “After I had reverently admired the Goethe-room in the castle of Dornburg, I wandered, on a hot July day, over the shady meadows to Jena, singing lustily with my gay comrades. As I entered the venerable old market-place I found a troop of lively students in front of the Burgkeller, with coloured caps and long pipes, singing, and drinking the famous Lichtenhain beer from wooden tankards. It made a great impression on me, and as I took a tankard with them I made up my mind that I would some day be one of them.”