86 HAECKEL: HIS LIFE, WORK, AND COMPANIONS 
shoals during summer that an oar could not be dipped into 
the water without injury to many. And in a shallow of 
the Mediterranean it is a sight not to be forgotten to watch 
their iridescent forms flashing in the sunlight below the 
surface of the sea. Many of them are bell-shaped, though 
where the clapper of the bell should be there is found a 
stomach provided with a mouth. 
Zoologically the meduse are an order of ocean jelly- 
fish, of the class hydrozoa. The fresh water polyps, 
Trembley so well described a century and a half ago, are 
their dwarfed, distant relations ; and the fossil graptolites 
in the rocks of our Hamilton escarpment, are still more 
distant members of their kindred. Haeckel intended to 
describe one family after another of all the meduse. If his 
scheme was not carried to completion, his investigations 
went further than those of his predecessors who were men 
of distinction. His work in this field of labour reached 
over several years. His first paper appeared in 1864; and 
more than two decades afterwards the twenty-eighth 
volume of the Challenger Reports contained his elaborate 
memoir on one form of the strange compound social 
medusz—the syphonophora. 
Haeckel’s ‘‘ System of the Meduse,’’ with atlasof fine 
plates, he published in 1879. It was mainly technical—a 
work written by a specialist for specialists—but nevertheless 
had its popular side. Even in the dry work of naming 
species, the human, imaginative side of Haeckel’s nature 
could not be hidden. One species he named melusina 
formosa after the old charming legend of the water-fay who 
was wedded to the Prince. His first wife died in her 
twenty-ninth year. Her loss wrung from his heart the cry 
of Goethe: ‘‘ What are the hopes and pains built up by 
man the creature of a day!’’ Among the names in his 
list is this note: ‘‘ This specific name of this most beautiful 
of the medusze, the desmonema annasethe, is in memory of 
Anna Sethe, the gifted and refined wife to whom the 
author of this work owes the happiest years of his life. 
