30 HAECKEL 



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 Eeichert, whom 

 he did not love ; later it was associated with Du 

 Bois-Eeymond and Virchow, who gradually be- 

 came 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 



