92 HAECKEL 



affinity. In such a spot the artist in Haeckel 

 could compromise with the zoologist. His aesthetic 

 nature had revelled in landscape, peasantry, and 

 song. Now the Miiller-net and the microscope 

 revealed a new world of hidden beauty that none 

 had appreciated before him. In devoting himself 

 to it he was still half engrossed in his quest of 

 beauty; but the other half of him was rapidly 

 attaining a mastery of serious zoology.) 



It is a common belief that aesthetic appreciation 

 ceases as soon as we sit down to the microscope. 

 There is the magnificent blue Strait of Messina. 

 Your eye, embracing its whole length, drinks in 

 its beauty in deep draughts. What will your 

 microscope make of it ? Its field can only take 

 in a single drop of water, and this does not grow 

 more blue when you thus analyse it. Let science 

 go further afield : this is the land of beauty. All 

 those doctrines of histology, embryology, and so 

 on, built on the microscope, are thought to be 

 poles removed from aesthetic enjoyment. They 

 dissolve everything — man's soft, white skin, the 

 perfumed leaf of the rose, the bright wing of the 

 butterfly — into ** cells. ' It is mere ignorance to 

 talk in this way. Nature's beauty is by no means 

 so thin a covering that the microscope must 

 at once pierce through it. Eather does it reveal 

 to us in incalculable wealth a whole firmament 

 of new stars, a new world of beauties, if we 

 choose the right way to see them. Haeckel 

 did choose the right way. 



At his very first dips into the harbour of 



