THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 245 



Miklucho-Maclay and Fol, were with them. Greeff 

 has given a full account of the journey in a whole 

 volume (published at Bonn, 1868), and Haeckel 

 has written of it in two articles, one of which (in 

 the fifth volume of the Zeitsclirift cler Gesellschaft 

 filr Erdkimde^ Berlin, 1870) is a perfect master- 

 piece of narrative and description of scenery. 

 After a long search they chose as the best 

 station for studying marine animals, especially 

 the medusae, the little island of Lanzarote, 

 instead of one of the chief islands. Here they 

 fished and drew, in the manner taught by 

 Johannes Miiller, for three months, from Decem- 

 ber, 1866, to February, 1867. It is not exactly 

 an ideal place. ^'Imagine yourself dumped down 

 on the moor ! " Haeckel said afterwards in his 

 description of it. A piece of arid land that looked 

 like a strip of the Sahara in the middle of the 

 ocean. There is hardly any water, and the 

 vegetation is correspondingly meagre. Across 

 the middle of the island stretches a chain of 

 volcanic craters, and old lava-fields run down 

 from them as far as the coast. Everything of 

 zoological interest in the place was to be found 

 in the sea. There they found abundance. As in 

 Messina, certain local currents drove the rich 

 animal plancton together until there were literally 

 rivers or streets of tiny animals. One had only 

 to dip in one's nets and glasses, and bring up 

 whole shoals with every drop of water. 



Haeckel had come chiefly to study the medusae. 

 But this led him on much further to a great 



