Haeckel

In the January of 1859 Haeckel, then in his twenty-fifth year, came to Italy with the determination “to do it thoroughly.” By the autumn the body of the peninsula had been covered down to Naples, Capri, and Ischia. The winter, until April, 1860, was spent at Messina.

There are plenty of very strenuous students, later Privy Councillors as well as archæologists and zoologists, who find a year in Italy a very simple matter. They arrive, make the due round of sights, and then at once disappear into some library or institute, burying themselves like moles in some special work or other, just as they would do at home. The only time you can see them is over their Munich beer in the evening; and if there are a number of them together they smoke their cigars and sing a German student’s song, as they would do at home. These good folk have very different dispositions behind their goggles, but they have never been lit up by the fire of Goethe. They are quite content to write home like the churlish Herder; Italy is pretty enough in Goethe’s writings, but one ought not to go there oneself. The modern scholar of this type may add that the cigars are bad and beer dear. Very different was Haeckel’s verdict. “In Sicily I was nearly thrown out of my line and made a landscape-painter.” The æsthetic man in him was the first to lift up his arms with vigour under this new, free, inspiring sun. His words are no idle phrase. The moment he tried it Haeckel discovered that he had a genius for landscape-painting. Even in regard to this gift we see the truth of what I have already said in other connections; the sternest materialists and scientific revolutionaries of the nineteenth century were men of considerable artistic power. There was the solid Vogt, a painter and poet; Moleschott, the soul-comrade of Hermann Hettner; Strauss, who wrote some poems of great and lasting beauty; Feuerbach, and others. Even Büchner, the boldest and most advanced of them all, has written poetry under a pseudonym.^[1] Darwin took only two books with him in the little cabin of his ship, Lyell’s Geology and Paradise Lost. There is a complete gallery of fine water-colours in Haeckel’s house to-day that have been brought from three quarters of the globe. His son Walter has inherited the artistic gift, and become a painter. It might be said that a good landscape-painter would hardly recompense us for the loss of the philosopher and scientist that Haeckel became in the nineteenth century. The simple steel pen, the inspired pencil of the thinker, did more for humanity in his hand than could have been done by the most splendid colour-symphonies of the most inspired landscape-painter. I have often thought this as I looked over, in the evening at Haeckel’s house, the then unpublished treasures of his artistic faculty. A work like his History of Creation has counted for a stratum in the thought of humanity. What are even the masterpieces of a Hildebrandt in comparison with it! Yet there was undoubtedly the note of genius in these drawings; some of them showed more than Hildebrandt’s cleverness (we know to-day that Hildebrandt’s highly coloured pictures did not even approximate to the real natural light of southern scenes) and glow of colour. It seemed to me that here again the man had dreams of a lost love: a dream of the gay, wandering pittore, who asks nothing but a sunset in violet, carmine, and gold, instead of being the sober unriddler of the world’s problems. Since that time the house of Fr. Eugen Köhler, to which we owe the fine new edition of Naumann’s classic work on birds, with its coloured plates, has undertaken to publish Haeckel’s water-colours, as “Travel Pictures,” in a splendid and monumental work.

During the year in Italy all these gifts were employed together. Italy was exactly the land for Haeckel’s temperament, with its mixture of lofty classic elements and natural beauty and simple, naïve unpretentiousness. For the first time he felt that he was a cosmopolitan student. He had never been a devotee of the student’s beer-feasts. He had no need of alcoholic stimulant. Gegenbaur of Würtzburg, the insatiable smoker, once said to him in joke, “If you would only smoke, we might make something out of you.” It was done, in any case. His personal inclinations were in his favour: an illimitable love of travel, good spirits that rose in proportion to the absurdity of his accommodation, and a simple delight in everything human that enabled him to talk and travel with the humblest as if they were his equals. He spent a night with a young worker in a haystack, and when he was asked what he was, he pointed to his paint-box and brush: “House-painter.” “I thought so when I saw you,” said the youth, and he asked Haeckel to start a workshop together with him. Italy was the ideal land for a visitor of that type. There was no part of the world from which he was so pleased to receive recognition in his years of fame as Italy; and he received it in abundance, for the appreciation was mutual.

I will add a page here that was supplied for the present work by a friendly hand, a man who is as well known to thousands as Haeckel himself—Hermann Allmers, “the poet of the fens, chief of Frisia, and splendid fellow,” as Haeckel has called him. He died in the spring of 1902 at an advanced age. He met Haeckel in Italy, and tells the story in his verse and prose. Forty years after their meeting he wrote me that Haeckel was “the finest man he ever met.”

“Yes, dear reader, whenever I let these verses and their splendid truth vibrate again in my soul—and how often and how gladly I do it!—I have to say, Such days thou shalt never know again—such happy entrance into another’s heart. And what a heart it was that bared itself to me with all it hid and would soon reveal! We were in a café at Naples, a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung lying between him and me. It was in the best part of the spring of 1859. We both reached for it, and told our names, and the friendship was begun. ‘You must excuse me,’ Haeckel said, ‘I have to go to Ischia to-night by the market-boat.’ ‘To Ischia? That’s good: I am going there myself. ‘I am very glad, because I heard I was to be alone. It starts at nine o’clock.’ That was all that had passed between us before the crossing. What I have described in the above verses only began when we, the only Germans on board, made ourselves comfortable on the open deck. Before the journey was over we were intimate friends, and have remained friends in joy and sorrow to this moment, though the mental differences between us are enormous. However, Casamicciola brought us together in a wonderful way. We had common quarters, and always went out together for walks or botanising; we were never separated when we painted or drew, as Haeckel did with real passion. On the third morning, when we found some rare thermal plants in an almost broiling meadow and discovered nearly at the same spot the ruins of an ancient Roman bath, the remarkable coincidence affected us so much that we embraced each other joyously and dedicated the rest of our flask to them. We both felt that we could not do otherwise. So we pleasantly enjoyed the magnificent scene that lay at our feet from the height of Epomeo. We stripped off nearly the whole of our clothes, and dipped, in almost primitive nakedness, in the warm muddy streams that shot up out of the dark depths under a growth of tendrils and ferns. We shouted out, ‘How fine it is in these warm and beautifully shaded brooks! How delightful it must be in the ravines of Atlas! We must go there.’ We spent more than a whole day in the most marvellous ravines of Atlas, though neither of us had the least idea of them. But we determined to make the journey there, and sketched it out in detail, to be undertaken as soon as we left Italy. He contracted a perfect fever for travelling. We were four weeks in Pagano’s excellent inn at Capri with a few artists, and he completely lost himself with delight. He became intimate with the young artists; being hitherto surrounded by men of scientific interests, he had avoided them. The intermediary between Haeckel and them was myself. I liked no one better than genial artists. Now Haeckel was seized with a passion for painting landscapes day after day. He was especially interested in the most fantastically shaped rocks. On the other hand, he neglected his marine animals, and did not return to them entirely until he got to Messina, where he devoted himself to the radiolaria, which were destined to play so important a part in his work. Darwin, who was soon to dominate his whole thought, had little significance for him at that time, as the struggle for life had not yet been discovered. We rarely spoke of it, but talked constantly of Johannes Müller. He was Haeckel’s ideal, as long as I kept in touch with him. He also spoke often and generously of his university friends, Dr. W. D. Focke, who was his special botanical comrade, Dr. Dreyer and Dr. Strube, who were his chief friends at the university at Würtzburg. The ordinary life and pleasures of the student, and their heavy beer-drinking, were a torture to him; he avoided them as much as possible. Very often I could not understand how it was that I brought him to the highest pitch of gaiety, whereas on all his earlier travels, especially when botany was still his favourite science, he would, after the common meal, withdraw quietly with his books and plants to the solitude of his own room. Yet he could be the gayest of all. In fact, his hearty and wonderful laugh, in all notes up to the very highest, rings over and over again in the memory of any man who has once heard it; it is the frank laughter of a glad human heart. And whoever has seen the deep earnestness with which the great scientist threw himself into the study of the most arduous problems would be astounded to hear it.”

The Strait of Messina is the pearl of Italy. In my opinion it is finer than Naples. The huge volcano and the deep blue strip of water, that seems to be confined between the white coasts like some fabulous giant-stream, give a feeling of sublimity beside which the Bay of Naples seems but an idyll in the memory. The colours are more vivid; you think you would catch hold of the blue bodily if you put your hand in the water. It is a land of ancient myths. The Cyclops hammer their work in Etna. Scylla and Charybdis lurk in the Strait. Once, in the days of Homer, when the sun of civilisation still lay on a corner of Asia, a dim Münchhausen-world was lived here, such as we find to-day in the heart of Africa or New Guinea. But times changed. Zoologists came and fished with Müller-nets for tiny transparent sea-creatures in the gentle periodic currents, that may once have given rise to the legend of Scylla and Charybdis. There is no place more favourable for the purpose than the harbour of Messina. The basin is open only at one spot, towards the north. The westerly wind is cut off from the town by the mountains, and can do no harm. Even the detested southern wind, the sirocco, that lashes the Strait till it is white with foam, cannot enter. There is only the north wind that drives the water into the basin. The waves it brings in are full of millions of sea-animals, which accumulate in the cul-de-sac of the harbour. In fact, if the sirocco has previously been blowing in the Strait and gathered great swarms of animals from the southern parts at the mouth of the harbour, and then the north wind drives them all inside, the whole of the water seems to be alive with them. If you dip a glass in it, you do not get water, but a sort of “animal stew,” the living things making up more of the bulk than the fluid—little crystalline creatures, medusæ, salpæ, crustacea, vermalia, and others of many kinds.

It was at this classic spot that Haeckel would lay the foundation of his fame as a zoologist, by the study of a group of minute creatures that appealed equally to the æsthetic sense by the mysterious beauty of their forms. There can be little doubt that we can see in this, not only a fortunate accident, but also the play of some hidden affinity. In such a spot the artist in Haeckel could compromise with the zoologist. His æsthetic nature had revelled in landscape, peasantry, and song. Now the Müller-net and the microscope revealed a new world of hidden beauty that none had appreciated before him. In devoting himself to it he was still half engrossed in his quest of beauty; but the other half of him was rapidly attaining a mastery of serious zoology.

It is a common belief that æsthetic appreciation ceases as soon as we sit down to the microscope. There is the magnificent blue Strait of Messina. Your eye, embracing its whole length, drinks in its beauty in deep draughts. What will your microscope make of it? Its field can only take in a single drop of water, and this does not grow more blue when you thus analyse it. Let science go further afield: this is the land of beauty. All those doctrines of histology, embryology, and so on, built on the microscope, are thought to be poles removed from æsthetic enjoyment. They dissolve everything—man’s soft, white skin, the perfumed leaf of the rose, the bright wing of the butterfly—into “cells.” It is mere ignorance to talk in this way. Nature’s beauty is by no means so thin a covering that the microscope must at once pierce through it. Rather does it reveal to us in incalculable wealth a whole firmament of new stars, a new world of beauties, if we choose the right way to see them. Haeckel did choose the right way.

At his very first dips into the harbour of Messina, in October, 1859, he got certain curious lumps and strips of jelly. The local fishermen called them ovi di mare (sea-eggs). It was, in fact, natural enough to regard these inert creatures as strings of mollusc-eggs, when their real nature was unknown. But our young student already knew what they were. They were social radiolaria.

The word “radiolarium,” from radius (a ray), means a raying or radiating animal. It is difficult for the inexpert to imagine the structure of one of these creatures. He must first put entirely on one side all the features that he usually associates with an “animal.” The radiolarian lives, moves, has sensations, breathes, eats, and reproduces, but in a totally different way from that we are accustomed to see. Its body consists essentially of a particle of homogeneous living matter. There is merely a firmer nucleus in the centre of it, and the soft gelatinous matter is thickened at the surface to form a kind of capsule. Otherwise there is no trace of any real “organ.” The little blob of jelly eats—but it has no stomach; it eats with its whole body, its soft, jelly-like substance closing entirely over particles of food and absorbing them. It breathes (with the animal type of respiration)—but it has neither lungs nor gills; the whole body takes in oxygen and gives off carbonic acid. It swims about—yet it has neither legs nor fins; the pulpy mass of its body flows, when it is necessary, into a crown of streamers or loose processes, that keep the body neatly balanced; when they are no longer required, they sink back into the gelatinous mass. We study the “histology” of these curious social-living creatures under a powerful microscope. As I have explained, the tissues and organs of the higher animals break up under the microscope into a most ingeniously constructed network of tiny living gelatinous corpuscles with a nucleus in the centre—the cells. But our radiolarian has no more got tissues composed of cells than it has stomach or lungs or any other organ. It is merely a single cell with a nucleus and a jelly-like body. Yet in this case the single cell is a whole individual, a complete animal, that lives, moves, eats, breathes, and so on. The radiolarian is, in comparison with the splendid cell-tapestry of the higher animals, a poor little atom of life. It must be put deep down in the animal series. What a vast distance! Above is man, built of myriads of cells woven into the most ingenious tissues and the most perfect organs for each function of life; below we have the radiolarian, in which a single cell must discharge all the vital functions, because its whole body is merely one cell. But there is another wonder. This tiny particle of living slime, floating in the blue waves at Messina, hardly more visible than a drop of spittle, has a most remarkable quality. It is able to assimilate a kind of matter that the chemist calls siliceous (flinty) matter—the stuff that forms, when it is crystallised in chemical purity, the well-known rock-crystal. This flint matter (and sometimes a similar substance) is then exuded again by the radiolarian—no one knows quite how—from its gelatinous body, and built into so beautiful a form that even a child will clap its hands and cry, “How lovely!” when it sees it through the microscope. We may put it that the radiolarian forms a coat of mail for itself from this siliceous matter: we may at the same time call it a float or buoy. The hard flinty structure serves to keep it balanced when it is swimming, just as when a loose piece of jelly attaches itself to a cork disk. Thus a round trellis-work shell is formed about the animal, and through the apertures it thrusts gelatinous processes that act as oars, and can be put forth or drawn in at will; outside this shell, again, may be all sorts of structures, such as zigzag shaped rods, radiating stars, bundles of streamers, and so on. It is a most wonderful sight. It is as if each class of these beings had its private taste, and, in virtue of a kind of tradition, built a different type of flinty skeleton from all the others. Here begins the peculiar artistic wizardry of these tiny and lowly creatures, that lifts them at once high up in the scale of animated natural objects with a great display of beauty. We find every possible variation of ornament within the limits of the particular type: an infinite number of crystalline and superb variations on the theme of trellis-work, stars, radiating shields, crosses, and halberds. They give an impression at once of human art-work, for there is nothing else in the whole of nature with which we may compare them. The radiolarian, therefore, is an animal of the utmost simplicity of bodily frame that, by some force or other, creates the highest and most varied beauty that we find anywhere in nature, living or dead, below the level of human art.

Haeckel’s good genius brought him to these radiolaria. Until the winter of 1859-1860 he knew very little about them. When a radiolarian dies its soft body naturally melts away and perishes. But the art-work of its life, the star or shield of flinty matter, remains; it either sinks to the bottom or is washed ashore, where numbers of them may accumulate. If a pinch of mud or sand from the shore is put under the microscope the observer will see lovely artistic fragments, and ask what is the meaning of the miracle. Ehrenberg, the venerable Berlin microscopist, was the first to have the experience. He was not in the habit of going to the sea himself, but had specimens sent to him, and found in them shells of the radiolaria. Though they were so small, their artistic quality seemed to him to be so great that he assumed they were built by very advanced animals of the star-fish or sea-urchin type. That there were unicellular protozoa with a simple gelatinous body and no higher organs he stoutly denied, and he had the support of his leading contemporaries everywhere. But his colleague, Johannes Müller, who fished in the sea himself, came across living specimens in the Mediterranean in the first half of the fifties. It appeared that they were really very lowly animals at least. Müller christened them the radiolaria, classified the fifty species that he discovered, and at his death left the subject well prepared for the first student who should go more fully into it. His final work on them did not appear until after his death, in 1858, the sunset-glow of his brilliant scientific career. Perhaps he would have gone more deeply into the mysteries he had encountered but for a curious accident. Just as he discovered the subject, two years before his death, he had a terrible experience. The ship in which he was returning from a holiday in Norway was wrecked. A favourite pupil of his was drowned, and he himself narrowly escaped by swimming to land. After that he could not be induced to enter a boat during his last trips to the sea, and so the thorough study of these most graceful inhabitants of the Mediterranean was abandoned. But when Haeckel fished at Villefranche with Kölliker of Würtzburg, and Müller was at Nice, he was urged by the master, as a kind of testamentary injunction, that “something might be done” with the radiolaria. And when he fished up a pretty crown of socially-united radiolaria on first rowing over the Messina harbour, he thought it would be a grateful offering to the memory of the dead hero of his zoological dreams to continue the study of the radiolaria. At once he seemed to enter the treasure-house of a fairy tale. When the campaign was ended in the Messina harbour in April, 1860, he had discovered no less than 144 new species, and each species proved a fresh master of decorative art. At the same time he studied the nature of the gelatinous body. Ehrenberg’s theory was destroyed for ever. Granting that there were certain difficulties (since explained away) in the way of admitting the existence of real unicellular creatures, he at all events gathered an enormous amount of new and helpful information as to the nature of these soft, almost organless beings and of the slimy living matter (called sarcode or protoplasm) of which they were composed. His mind matured rapidly in these quiet days at Messina, while his æsthetic nature was plunged in admiration of the beauty of the siliceous coats. The last scruple with regard to the old story of creation fell from him like the covering of a pupa. If a naked bit of slime like the radiolarian could form from its body this glorious artistic structure, why may not man also, as he paints his pictures under the glow of Italy’s colour, be merely a natural being, of like texture to the radiolarian? And if this radiolarian had in its life built up the crystalline, rhythmic structure, why may there not be merely a difference of degree, not of kind, between the “dead” crystal and the “living” radiolarian?

In May, 1860, Haeckel returned from Messina to Berlin. He brought with him splendid drawings of the perishable body of his treasures, numbers of prepared specimens, and whole bottles full of their imperishable shells. On the 17th of September, 1860, he made the first communication of his discoveries to his colleagues in the zoological section of the Scientific Congress at Königsberg. Virchow was amongst his admiring audience. On the 13th and the 20th of December in the same year Peters read a short account in the Berlin Academy of Science that drew more general attention. He set to work on a fine monograph, with splendid plates and with all his conclusions in the text. Before it was finished, however, he had a number of personal experiences and changes of mind. Gegenbaur had in the meantime been appointed Professor of Anatomy at Jena. Before he started for Italy, Haeckel had visited his friend at Jena during the celebration of the third centenary of the university. “We spent a very happy time there,” Haeckel wrote afterwards, “enjoying the beautiful prospect (from the heights of the Saale valley) and the Thuringian beef-sausages.” Now there were more serious things to discuss. Gegenbaur’s lot had once seemed to him a kind of model. Now a part of it was fulfilled: he had been to Messina. Meantime Gegenbaur had advanced a station. Haeckel wanted to follow him, and get a position at Jena. There was no such thing as a professorship of zoology or a zoological institute there, but all that might—nay, must—be changed some day. What Gegenbaur was doing left plenty of room for another chair to be set up. And to be with his best friend!

In March, 1861, Haeckel completed the Dissertatio pro venia legendi at Jena that he had quickly decided on. It dealt, of course, with his new field: the limit and the system of the animal group to which the radiolaria belonged, the rhizopods. He was immediately appointed private teacher at Jena, and found himself in the lovely valley of the Saale, beneath the mountain about whose summit the red rays lingered. He had been drawn from Berlin to Messina to find a home—a home for ever—in the increasing stress.

In the following year, 1862, the official position of Extraordinary Professor of Zoology was created, and this brought him close, even externally, to Gegenbaur. Everything was, it is true, in a very primitive condition at first. In August he married Anna Sethe—a sunny dream of fresh young happiness. In the same year he published his Monograph on the Radiolaria, a huge folio volume with thirty-five remarkably good copperplates, such as our more rational but slighter technical methods no longer dare produce. Wagenschieber, of Berlin, the last of the fine scientific copper etchers, had been in constant personal touch with Haeckel, and reproduced his original drawings in masterly style. With this work Haeckel was fully established in his position as a professional zoologist. It is still one of the finest monographs that was issued in the nineteenth century; from the literary point of view, also, it was one of the purest and most lucid works of its kind, full of great and earnest thoughts, and without any bitterness—a work, perhaps, that Haeckel has not since equalled. The most influential and official scientists of the time had to respect this work: possibly with the sole exception of the aged Ehrenberg, to whom it dealt a deadly blow in this department, without, of course, undervaluing his great antecedent services. He never even studied it sufficiently to be able to quote the title of it correctly.

Nevertheless, a flame broke out at one spot in this monograph. In a very short time Haeckel’s whole figure would stand out in the red reflection of its glow—a figure really great, solitary, suddenly deserted by all the bewigged and powdered professors—Haeckel himself, as the world has come to know him.