184 HAECKEL 



of the Calabrian mountains by the colour-harmony 

 of their purple and gold banks of cloud and their 

 violet shadows." 



" What are the hopes, what are the plans, that 

 man, the creature of a day, builds up ? " 



The words were written by a poet, in his fatal 

 illness, at the spot where the two strong spirits 

 now worked. In the midst of all his hopes and 

 plans Haeckel was struck by a Niobe-shaft. On 

 February 16th, 1864, just on his thirtieth birth- 

 day, his wife, only in her twenty-ninth year, in the 

 full force of mind and of love, succumbed to blood- 

 poisoning. 



I turn to the thick volume of Haeckel's Mono- 

 graph on the MeduscB, Part I. : " System of the 

 Medusa ; " with an atlas of forty beautiful plates : 

 published by Gustav Fischer, of Jena, in 1879. 

 Few people except zoologists with a technical 

 interest in it have ever opened this voluminous 

 work — why should they ? It is a heavy work, with 

 dry diagnoses. The author seems to be far away 

 from all general questions, if ever he was, in the 

 utter stillness of his study. This pure accumula- 

 tion of matter for truth's sake does not reach the 

 ear of the world. It lays up material for remote 

 days, before which the individual fades away ; it is 

 merely catalogued material of the most technical 

 character. Yet, as I turn over the pages, I 

 seem to see a little image from time to time 

 that is almost like the rose-red or golden-brown 

 medusae in the sterile, illimitable ocean. In truth 

 neither ocean nor book is sterile ; but they are grey 



