THE RADIOLARIA
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.
Footnote 1:
Büchner’s brother tells how, when Ludwig furtively brought to him the
manuscript of _Force and Matter_, he at once guessed it was a romance
or an epic that so much secret work had been expended on. [Trans.]
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.”
“TO ERNST HAECKEL.
Dost thou remember the magic night,
A night I never cease to see,
That brought us both to Ischia?
How smooth the boat sailed gently in,
How silent was the great broad bay
Unutterably noble and sublime,
In all its star-lit loveliness,
As sky and sea met in embrace.
With fairy-light the waters gleamed
As helm ploughed gently through the wave,
And overhead a deep red glow
Vesuvius from its larva poured.
We were yet strangers at the time,
One hour alone had each the other seen,
Yet something urged us both to speak—
To speak, anon, from heart’s great deeps.
To speak of all we held of worth,
All that had led us to the spot,
All the fair gifts of happy fate,
And the untoward accidents of life;
Of distant home, of fatherland,
Of the full days of beauty’s quest.
Hand clasped in hand we told our joy:
Need I recall it from the mist?
In fine of thy dear love thou told’st
And sacred silence fell on thee.
On moved the barque with leisured pace
Across the deeper silence of the bay.
Behind us vanished Posilippo
And Baja’s gulf and Cape Miseno.
As Procida passed slowly by
The gentle dawn stole o’er the night,
And Epomeo’s head was lit,
With the first rays of new-born sun,
And Ischia, nobler than our dreams,
Uprose before our wondering eyes.
Above, mantled in its own loveliness,
Calling us sweetly from the bay
Up to its gentle, vine-clothed heights,
Sat radiant Casamicciola.
How thou and I the glad days spent
Thou knowest well. And now?
Now all is ruin and decay,
A ghastly tomb. We’ll let it rest.
Think rather of the linkèd lives
We spent, and the whole joy of earth,
That never more will gladden us
While sun and stars gleam overhead.
What was it opened then our hearts?
What was it forged the golden chain?
It was—thou know’st it well, comrade—
The sailing on that magic night.”
“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_.
[Illustration:
A RADIOLARIAN.
(_Lychnaspis miranda._)
]
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.
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