Chapter VI: The “general Morphology” (3)

It was not an expensive journey, but it came as a fresh greeting from Nature. It was a new ocean after the long studies on the Mediterranean. What might it not afford in the way of medusæ and other zoological prizes when the general beauty of the landscape, that had enchanted Humboldt, had been fully enjoyed. With a mingling of his overflowing passion for Nature, and the gloomy fatalism that told him this would be his “last voyage” after his “last book,” he asked permission to leave Jena in the autumn of 1866, when the printing of the _Morphology_ was completed, and set out. It was no more to be his last voyage than the _Morphology_ to be his last testament. Although still subdued with resignation in his inner life, he came home in the spring of 1867 with a new elasticity of body and mind, restored by the influence of the palms and bananas and spurge, and braced for the great struggle of his life that was now to begin in earnest.

The voyage had really two aims. To see the volcano above a palm-clad coast, with the Atlantic Ocean bringing its medusæ; and to work for Darwin.

A personal connection between the two had already been formed as a matter of course. Darwin, almost confined for years to his isolated home at Down owing to his constant ill-health, had received a copy of the _Radiolaria_, and the correspondence had begun. The work had as yet met with little encouragement from the ranks of exact scientists. It cannot have been a matter of indifference to Darwin personally that so distinguished a work, a real model of professional research, had come over to him. Proofs of the _Morphology_ were sent over to Down before the book was ready for publication. Darwin read German with difficulty, but in this case he was stimulated to make an unusual effort. At last Haeckel himself made his appearance at the master’s home. It seemed as though he had to visit him in person to receive his blessing. It was, at all events, a happy moment in the history of Darwinism when the two men first met whose names will be inseparable in literature.

This was in October, 1866; Darwin had sent his carriage to bring Haeckel from the station. A sunny autumn morning smiled on the homely and beautiful English landscape with its bright woods and golden broom and red erica and evergreen oaks. Haeckel has described their first meeting. “When the carriage drew up before Darwin’s house, with its ivy and its shadowy elms, the great scientist stepped out of the shade of the creeper-covered porch to meet me. He had a tall and venerable appearance, with the broad shoulders of an Atlas that bore a world of thought: a Jove-like forehead, as we see in Goethe, with a lofty and broad vault, deeply furrowed by the plough of intellectual work. The tender and friendly eyes were overshadowed by the great roof of the prominent brows. The gentle mouth was framed in a long, silvery white beard. The noble expression of the whole face, the easy and soft voice, the slow and careful pronunciation, the natural and simple tenor of his conversation, took my heart by storm in the first hour that we talked together, just as his great work had taken my intelligence by storm at the first reading. I seemed to have before me a venerable sage of ancient Greece, a Socrates or an Aristotle.”

They were delighted to meet each other, for they were like natures, in their best qualities. Darwin had more passion in him than he ever expressed, and behind all Haeckel’s impetuosity there was the naïve and yielding temper of the child. He poured out his anger against the stubborn and bewigged professors who still held out against the luminous truth of the theory of evolution. Darwin put his hand on his shoulder, smiled, and said they were rather to be pitied than blamed, and that they could not keep back permanently the stream of truth. At heart, however, he was delighted with his fiery pupil. They were to fight their battle shoulder to shoulder for seventeen years. During all those years there was never the slightest disturbance of their friendship. Darwin knew well what an auxiliary he had in Haeckel. It is true that he wrote him a wonderful letter occasionally, in which he used the right of a senior to warn Haeckel not to deal so violently with his opponents. Violence only had the effect of making onlookers side with the party you attacked. We must be careful not to be too hasty in setting things up as positive truths, as we see every day people starting from the same premises and coming to opposite conclusions. But he was generally at one with Haeckel, and had the good spirit to acknowledge it openly. When Haeckel’s _History of Creation_ raised up the most extreme parties, and started the cry that a distinction must be drawn at once between Darwin’s real scientific ideas and Haeckel’s desperate excursions into natural philosophy, Darwin said, in the _Descent of Man_, which he had begun much earlier, but did not publish for some time, that he would never have written his book if he had then known Haeckel’s _History of Creation_. Haeckel had anticipated so much that he wished to say. And when Virchow attacked Haeckel in 1877, Darwin spoke very severely of the opponents who would make the eternal freedom to teach the truth dependent on the accidental conditions of a modern State. Haeckel visited him twice at Down. On February 12, 1882, he sent Darwin his congratulations on his seventy-third birthday from the summit of Adam’s Peak in Ceylon. This was his last greeting. Darwin died two months afterwards. There was a touch of romance in this last communication of the two great warriors. On the summit of the mountain, almost as sharp as a needle, and 2,500 yards above the Indian Ocean, a tiny temple of Buddha hangs like a stork’s nest suspended by chains. Buddha is believed to have left his footprints on the rocks here. The Mohammedan tradition, however, says it was done by Adam as he stood on one foot and bemoaned the loss of Paradise. In front of this holy trace, a depression in the rock about a foot long, Haeckel made a speech to his travelling companions, and they broke the neck of a bottle of Rhine wine to Darwin’s health. It is no little stretch of humanity’s pilgrimage, from Adam to Buddha and on to Darwin.

ERNST HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT MIKLUCHO-MACLAY
AT LANZAROTE, IN THE CANARIES, 1867.
]

In October, 1866, Haeckel had a companion in a teacher from Bonn, Richard Greeff (afterwards professor of zoology at Marburg). They took ship from London to Lisbon, where they were long detained for quarantine, though the annoyance was somewhat relieved by the discovery of an interesting medusa in the brackish water of the Tagus. They then went to Madeira and Teneriffe, not right into the tropics, but where they might get a breath of it, as it were. Two of Haeckel’s pupils, who both became well known afterwards, Miklucho-Maclay and Fol, were with them. Greeff has given a full account of the journey in a whole volume (published at Bonn, 1868), and Haeckel has written of it in two articles, one of which (in the fifth volume of the _Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde_, Berlin, 1870) is a perfect masterpiece of narrative and description of scenery. After a long search they chose as the best station for studying marine animals, especially the medusæ, the little island of Lanzarote, instead of one of the chief islands. Here they fished and drew, in the manner taught by Johannes Müller, for three months, from December, 1866, to February, 1867. It is not exactly an ideal place. “Imagine yourself dumped down on the moor!” Haeckel said afterwards in his description of it. A piece of arid land that looked like a strip of the Sahara in the middle of the ocean. There is hardly any water, and the vegetation is correspondingly meagre. Across the middle of the island stretches a chain of volcanic craters, and old lava-fields run down from them as far as the coast. Everything of zoological interest in the place was to be found in the sea. There they found abundance. As in Messina, certain local currents drove the rich animal plancton together until there were literally rivers or streets of tiny animals. One had only to dip in one’s nets and glasses, and bring up whole shoals with every drop of water.

Haeckel had come chiefly to study the medusæ. But this led him on much further to a great zoological problem. In his _General Morphology_ he had expounded his brilliant ideas on the subject of individuality, and now he encountered in the flesh one of the greatest marvels of animal individuality. He had shown how the higher individual is always made up of a community, a kind of state, of lower individuals. In the simplest instance there are the cells. Each of them is an individual. Millions of these individuals, banded together with division of labour for great collective operations, make up the human frame, and therefore the human “individual.” In the same way others form a beetle, a snail, or a single medusa. Sometimes, however, these higher individuals enter in turn into social combinations to form still higher communities. Human beings form social commonwealths, with division of labour among the individuals. Bees and ants form their communities in the same way. But in the latter cases the texture of the community seems to be much looser than in the preceding one. It is not so easy for the imagination to grasp a human commonwealth or a colony of bees as a real “over-individual.” It is, therefore, extremely instructive to find that at least one animal community of this kind is of so firm a texture that even on the most superficial examination it is recognised at once as an individual. This is found in one of the groups of the medusæ, the siphonophores, or social medusæ.

A number of single medusæ, each of which corresponds to what we regard as the individual man, combine and form a new body, a social individual. As citizens of this new state they have introduced the most rigid division of labour. One medusa does nothing but eat, and it thus provides nourishment for the rest, as they are all joined in one body. Another accomplishes the swimming movement; another has been converted entirely into a reproductive organ. In a word, the whole has become a “unity” once more, equipped with its various organs like any large body. Sometimes thousands of separate medusæ enter into the structure of one of these wonders of the deep. And as each of the medusæ is generally a very pretty, flower-like creature, the social groups with their charming colours look like floating garlands of flowers made of transparent and tinted crystal. Their beauty would soon fix Haeckel’s attention, but their bearing on his theory of individuality would give them an even greater value. For several years he had searched most attentively in the animal world for these “over-individuals” of the highest class. In the morphology he had had to be content with an old illustration of something of the kind, the star-fish. It was supposed to be a combination of vermalians. In this case the hypothesis has broken down, though there was a good deal to be said for it at first, and it was abandoned by him afterwards. But now, when he saw enormous numbers of siphonophores in the animal streams at Lanzarote, he entered upon a decisive study of the meaning of these real “social animals.” A social medusa has so great an appearance of unity that those who discovered it first did not believe it was a community, but a very complicated individual medusa. Vogt (1847) and Leuckart (1851) had denied this, and declared it to be a social group. But the controversy was still going on, as there was much difference of opinion as to the meaning of “social” and “state.” Haeckel now succeeded at Lanzarote in tracing for the first time the development of one of these siphonophores from the ovum. He was able to show that from the ovum only a single simple medusa is developed. This, then, becomes the parent of the community; it produces the rest of the members, not by a new sexual generation, but by budding out from itself, until the whole garland of connected individuals is ready to constitute the new over-individual, or the community. These luminous investigations were published three years afterwards (1869) in a work that was crowned by the Utrecht Society of Art and Science (_The Embryology of the Siphonophoræ_, with fourteen plates, published at Utrecht). But Haeckel returned time after time in later years to this group of animals with such great philosophic and zoological interest. When he had put before him in the eighties the whole of the siphonophores brought home by the splendid _Challenger_ expedition, he combined the material with the results of his own studies in a fine work, which was included (in English) in the publications of the _Challenger_ series at London, as the 28th volume of the _Zoology of the Challenger_, 1888. The voluminous work is illustrated with fifty masterly plates, some of them coloured, by Haeckel himself. The most important part of the text was also published in German at Jena, with the title, _System of the Siphonophoræ_. There is a good popular account of the siphonophore question in his lecture on “The Division of Labour in Nature and in Human Life” (1869). A few of these beautiful forms are also given on coloured plates in his illustrated work, _Art-forms in Nature_. Every thoughtful man ought, whatever his position is as regards Haeckel’s ideas, to glance at this material that he has so vigorously and clearly presented.

While he was conducting this research into the embryonic development of the siphonophores, Haeckel made certain experiments on phenomena that have lately been made the subject of a special “experimental mechanical embryology” by some of his pupils, particularly Professor Roux, of Halle. He cut up siphonophore ova into several pieces at the commencement of their development, and saw an incomplete social medusa develop from each fragment.

A SIPHONOPHORE
(_Disconalia gastroblasta._)
]

Thus the journey, like the earlier one to Messina, brought the indefatigable student into touch once more with a “philosophical animal.” This alone would have made it well worth the trouble. How many more of the kind the future might still have in reserve for him! In the quiet 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 Teneriffe. 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 the haunts of civilisation! How great and exalted in comparison does free Nature seem, as it unrolls before us, in one vast picture, the whole majesty and splendour of its creative power!” Thus he himself describes the moment. Something of that feeling of exalted solitude entered into his life. He stood firm and undazed—come what might.

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