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.
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.