A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



almost every day, until he had added one hundred and 

 fifty all told to Muller's list, or more than triple the 

 whole number previously known. The description of 

 these one hundred and fifty new radiolarians consti- 

 tuted Haeckel's first great contribution to zoology, and 

 won him his place as teacher at Jena in 1861. 



Henceforth Haeckel was, of course, known as the 

 greatest authority on this particular order of creatures. 

 For this reason it was that Professor Murray, the nat- 

 uralist of the famous expedition which the British 

 government sent around the world in the ship Chal- 

 lenger, asked Haeckel to work up the radiolarian ma- 

 terial that had been gathered during that voyage. 

 Murray showed Haeckel a little bottle containing water, 

 with a deposit of seeming clay or mud in the bottom. 

 "That mud," he said, "was dredged up from the bot- 

 tom of the ocean, and every particle of it is the shell 

 of a radiolarian . " " Impossible , ' ' said Haeckel . ' ' Yet 

 true," replied Murray, "as the microscope will soon 

 prove to you." 



So it did, and Professor Haeckel spent twelve years 

 examining that mud under the microscope, with the 

 result that, before he had done, he had discovered no 

 fewer than four thousand new species of radiolarians, 

 all of which, of course, had to be figured, described, and 

 christened. Think of baptizing four thousand creat- 

 ures, finding a new, distinct, and appropriate Latin 

 name for each and every one, and that, too, when the 

 creatures themselves are of microscopic size, and the 

 difference between them often so slight that only the 

 expert eye could detect it. Think, too, of the deadly 

 tedium of labor in detecting these differences, in sketch- 



