40 HAECKEL 



has said that the traveller who would combine the 

 pursuit of knowledge with aesthetic satisfaction 

 must be above all a botanist (in the closing retro- 

 spect of his Naturalist's Voyage Hound 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 excel- 

 lent 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 



