20 HAECKEL 



like the bright dew in which they are now 

 mirrored. He belongs to them, but they also are 

 in him. All-Nature : and he is a part of Nature. 

 All-development : and he is a phase of the 

 development. 



That is the great philosophical dream of the 

 nineteenth-century worker. His hand is black 

 with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the light 

 of the stars and of the world. 



No one can understand the greatness of a man 

 like Ernst Haeckel who has not learned this 

 melody. Nature is not a flat surface : it is an 

 ocean. When Columbus crossed the seas in his 

 three frail barques long ago to seek a new world in 

 the distant haze, he little dreamed that the gray 

 waters buried other new worlds a thousand yards 

 beneath his keel — worlds of the deep-sea, into 

 which our age has slowly dipped with its dredges. 

 So we in turn may run our eye over the blue 

 surface of nature, and think of its mysterious 

 gold-lands and spice-islands, without suspicion of 

 all that outspreads beneath our keel. Yet that 

 glorious day on which Columbus found '^his 

 land" is an inspiration to us, his remote grand- 

 children. The life we are going to examine will 

 bring before us such a morning of discovery. 

 Columbus went in quest of Zipangu (as he called 

 Japan), and he found America. Not one of us, 

 however gifted -he be, can be quite sure that, in 

 leading humanity, he is not sailing into another 

 such heroic error. Let us say that at once to all, 

 friends and opponents. America or Zipangu — let 



