AT THE UNIVERSITY 71 



fairly interested in this fairy-land of the sea, you 

 will find it difficult to get away from it." The 

 dream of Messina, that Gegenbaur had conjured 

 up, seemed to draw nearer. 



These lively days at Heligoland provided 

 Haeckel with the material for his first little zoo- 

 logical essay. It dealt with the development of 

 the ova of certain fishes {On the Ova of the Scom- 

 beresoces, published in Miiller's Archiv for 1855). 

 Miiller lent him ova from the Berlin collection to 

 complete his study. It is the same volume of the 

 Archiv in which, in Eeichert's introduction, the 

 great controversy breaks out over Virchow's preg- 

 nant assertion that each human being is a state 

 composed of millions of individual cells. 



Haeckel remained with Miiller at Berlin for the 

 whole winter, and was drawn more and more into 

 the province of comparative anatomy, or, to speak 

 more correctly, zoology. The official Professor 

 of Zoology at Berlin at the time was really the 

 aged Lichtenstein, who had occupied the chair 

 since 1811. Haeckel has humorously described 

 himself in later years as self-taught in his own 

 subject, saying that he had attended many most 

 excellent colleges, but never visited an official 

 school of zoology. The only opportunity to do so 

 at the time was under Lichtenstein, but that 

 professor bored him so much that he could not 

 attend his lectures. Lichtenstein was a venerable 

 representative of the old type of zoologist ; his 

 ideal was to give a careful external description 

 of the species on the strength of specimens chosen 



