THE RADIOLAEIA 97 



of the fifties. It appeared that they were really- 

 very lowly animals at least. Miiller christened 

 them the radiolaria, classified the fifty species 

 that he discovered, and at his death left the 

 subject well prepared for the first student who 

 should go more fully into it. His final work on 

 them did not appear until after his death, in 

 1858, the sunset-glow of his brilliant scientific 

 career. Perhaps he would have gone more deeply 

 into the mysteries he had encountered but for a 

 curious accident. Just as he discovered the sub- 

 ject, two years before his death, he had a terrible 

 experience. The ship in which he was returning 

 from a holiday in Norway was wrecked. A 

 favourite pupil of his was drowned, and he himself 

 narrowly escaped by swimming to land. After that 

 he could not be induced to enter a boat during his 

 last trips to the sea, and so the thorough study of 

 these most graceful inhabitants of the Mediter- 

 ranean was abandoned. But when Haeckel fished 

 at Villefranche with KoUiker of Wiirtzburg, and 

 Miiller was at Nice, he was urged by the master, as 

 a kind of testamentary injunction, that *' something 

 might be done " with the radiolaria. And when he 

 fished up a pretty crown of socially-united radio- 

 laria on first rowing over the Messina harbour, he 

 thought it would be a grateful offering to the 

 memory of the dead hero of his zoological dreams 

 to continue the study of the radiolaria. At once 

 he seemed to enter the treasure-house of a fairy 

 tale. When the campaign was ended in the Mes- 

 sina harbour in April, 1860, he had discovered no 



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