96 HAECKEL 



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 anywnere in nature, 

 living or dead, below the level of human art. 



Haeckel's good genius brought him to these radio- 

 laria. 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 ex- 

 perience. 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 uni- 

 cellular 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 Miiller, 

 who fished in the sea himself, came across living 

 specimens in the Mediterranean in the first half 



