258 HAECKEL 



from the university for six months, and went to 

 Ceylon. He left Jena on the 8th of October, and 

 did not return until April 21, 1882. The traveller 

 and aesthete in him revelled in this first plunge 

 into the tropics. How he was taken to the 

 enchanted land of India in the Lloyd steamer 

 Helios J a pretty reminiscence of the " heliozoa " 

 (sun-plants), a name he had himself invented ; how 

 he greeted his beloved medusae in their beautiful 

 tropical forms of the Indian Ocean ; how he lived 

 in the execrable but thoroughly tropical and in- 

 teresting Whist-Bungalow at Colombo, where 

 mysticism and an unholy joy in card-playing 

 occupied him until philosophic zoology came to 

 crown and redeem everything ; how he set up his 

 zoological laboratory far from the world at the 

 Cingalese village of Belligemma (which he inter- 

 preted hella gemma^ the *' pretty jewel"), and 

 fished with his Miiller net for radiolaria, medusae, 

 and siphonophorae, for six whole weeks, to the 

 intense bewilderment of the naked children of the 

 palms ; how he at last penetrated into the wildest 

 virgin forests of Ceylon, where one heard the heavy 

 tread of the elephant and the roar of the panther 

 — all this he has described in his Visit to Ceylon^ 

 the freshest expression of his temperament, which 

 belongs utterly to the free, artistic half of his life, 

 when Persephone has her summer days in the 

 land of flowers. 



He himself regarded this journey, happy and 

 favoured to the very last minute, as a crown and 

 conclusion of his travels that could never be sur- 



