42 HAECKEL 



had toiled with his heart's blood in " sad, splendid 

 years," owes its fame in the last third of the 

 century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of 

 adulation, but a simple truth, to say that among 

 the general public and abroad the reputation of 

 Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and 

 Fichte to Haeckel. His name stands for an epoch 

 in the life of Jena, like theirs ; all that hes 

 between is forgotten and unknown. In the 

 district itself it is as if the old epochs and the 

 new came into direct touch. 



I shall never forget the hour when this thought 

 came upon me in all its force. It was on a 

 snowless December day, when the dying fire of 

 autumn still lingered on the trees and bushes 

 where the blackbirds sang in front of the obser- 

 vatory. The table and seat of sandstone stood 

 out bleakly. A tablet indicated, in phrases of 

 Goethe's, that Schiller had dwelt there. It was 

 there that the Wallenstein was born. There the 

 two often sat in conversation — the conversation of 

 two of the greatest minds of the time, each in his 

 way a master spirit. To-day the little dome of 

 the observatory looks down on the spot ; it is not 

 a luxurious building, but it is a stage in the 

 onward journey, a symbol of the nineteenth 

 century as it leaps into the twentieth. A little 

 farther ofi rises the modern structure of the 

 Zoological Institute. In Goethe's day no one 

 dreamed that such a building would ever be seen. 

 It was opened by Haeckel in 1884. The zoo- 

 logical collection it houses was chiefly brought 



