AT THE UNIVERSITY 61 



there only. Every wave was full of innumerable 

 microscopic creatures, of the most instructive 

 forms. Amongst them were found the young 

 embryonic forms of familiar animals. At last the 

 cry, ^' To the sea," was raised. The older 

 professor of zoology had suffered from a kind of 

 hydrophobia. It was not possible to teach very 

 much at Berlin about the anatomy, histology, and 

 embryology of the sea-urchin from a few dried 

 flinty shells. At Wiirtzburg, animals were subtly 

 discussed by men who had never made a journey 

 to see them, while they were trampled under foot 

 every day by the visitors bathing in Heligoland. 

 They must move. It was not necessary to go 

 round the world: a holiday journey to the North 

 Sea or the Mediterranean would suffice. Every 

 cultured man had always considered that he must 

 make at least one pilgrimage to classic lands 

 before his education was complete. It was only 

 a question of changing material. They were not 

 to confine themselves to examining ruined temples 

 and aqueducts, but to take their microscopes down 

 to the coast, draw a bucketful of sea-water, and 

 examine its living contents — the living medusa 

 and sea-urchin, and the living world of the 

 swarming infusoria. But it was like the rending 

 of the great curtain of the temple. Zoology 

 seemed to expand ten-fold, a hundred-fold, in a 

 moment. A room in an obscure inn by the sea, 

 a microscope, and a couple of glasses of salt-water 

 with sediment every morning — and the finest 

 studies at Paris and London were as ploughed 



