250 HAECKEL 



months at Puerto del Arrecise, on Lanzarote, he 

 was gradually restored to his spiritual balance. 

 Nature had taken much from him, but she offered 

 him an inexhaustible return. His elasticity and 

 vigour of frame had been restored before he left 

 Tenerifie. In a twenty-two hours' tour, only 

 interrupted by two hours' sleep, he had climbed 

 to the highest summit of the Peak, in such an 

 unfavourable season (in the November snow) that 

 the native guides would not go any further in the 

 end ; all those who were with him except one 

 stopped short a little way from the top. The 

 short rest at the summit (4,128 yards above the 

 sea-level, on the icy edge of the crater) was 

 greatly enjoyed by him. He could see over a 

 distance of 5,700 square miles, as much as one- 

 fourth of the whole of Spain. '* The extraordinary 

 range and height of the horizon gives one a vague 

 idea of the infinity of space. The deep unbroken 

 silence and the consciousness that we have left 

 all animal and vegetal life far behind, produce a 

 profound feeling of solitude. One feels oneself, 

 with a certain pride, master of the situation that 

 has been secured with so much trouble and risk. 

 But the next moment one feels what we really are 

 — momentary waves in the infinite ocean of life, 

 transitory combinations of a comparatively small 

 number of organic cells, which, in the last resort, 

 owe their origin and significance to the peculiar 

 chemical properties of carbon. How small and 

 mean at such moments do we find the little play 

 of human passions that unfolds itself far below in 



