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.”