Prof. Ernst Haeckel 23 



as 1854 he had been engaged with Professors Kolliker and 

 Miiller pursuing experiments and researches in animal tis- 

 sues. In 1857 he published his first biological essay on the 

 tissues of crabs. Two years after, in 1859, we find him 

 withdrawing from his professional practice and spending 

 fifteen months in Italy, engaged in special zoological re- 

 searches. On his return, in 1861, he submitted the results 

 of his studies and experiments to the University of Jena, 

 especially in an essay on Khizopods. This appears to have 

 been the turning-point in his career, for in the next year 

 (1862) he was appointed Professor Extraordinary at that 

 university ; and there he has ever since remained, and has 

 been steadily advanced from one position of honor and use- 

 fulness to another, until it would seem that pretty much all 

 that a naturalist, philosopher, and author could desire has 

 fallen to his lot. 



During the thirty years of his professorship he has had 

 many calls to other and foreign institutions, but nothing 

 could equal the attractions which bind him to this favored, 

 we may say, to him, almost sacred locality ; for, by singular 

 good fortune, his " earthly days" are spent under the shadow 

 of those Thuringian mountains where his great protagonist 

 and inspirer, Goethe, dreamed and lived, and prophetically 

 poetized the religion of evolution ; and there he works, too, 

 in that very same old independent University of Jena which 

 Goethe directed for years with the expressed hope that it 

 would some day open up this new science of evolution to 

 the world. How deeply this landscape and these associations 

 affect and inspire our professor is seen by his touching fare- 

 well to them on his departure .to India and Ceylon in Octo- 

 ber, 1881. Take this page, for instance, which, as if a cur- 

 tain were raised, opens our view at once into the very heart 

 of the man (page 11) : 



"My arrangements at last completed, and the sixteen 

 boxes sent in advance to Trieste, I was ready to take leave 

 of dear quiet Jena on the morning of the 8th of October. 

 When the last moment arrived, I found that a six months' 

 absence from home would be no easy task for the father of 

 a family who had already attained the age of forty-seven 

 years. With what different emotions would I have taken 

 my departure twenty-five years ago, when a tropical journey 

 was the chief aim of my life ! True, the experience of 

 twenty-five years of teaching and zoological study would 

 enable me to accomplish more than I could have done 



