The Invention of Nature (46 page)

Early in February 1859 Haeckel arrived in Italy where he hoped to find new marine invertebrates. Anything would do, from jellyfish to tiny single-celled organisms, as long as a discovery launched his new career. After some weeks of sightseeing in Florence and Rome, Haeckel travelled to Naples to start working in earnest but nothing went to plan. The fishermen refused to assist him. The city was dirty and noisy. The streets were full of crooks and swindlers – and he was paying inflated prices for everything. It was hot and dusty. There were not enough sea urchins and jellyfish.

It was in Naples that Haeckel received the letter in which his father reported the news of Humboldt’s death and which made him think not only about art and science, but also about his own future. In the noisy narrow Neapolitan streets that snaked like a labyrinth below the imposing shape of Vesuvius, Haeckel once again felt the battle of the two souls in his chest. On 17 June, three weeks after he heard about his hero’s death, Haeckel couldn’t face Naples any more. Instead, he went to Ischia, a small island just a short boat ride away in the Gulf of Naples.

On Ischia Haeckel became acquainted with a German poet and painter, Hermann Allmers. For a week the two men wandered across the island, sketching, hiking, swimming and talking. They enjoyed each other’s company so much that they decided to travel together for a while. When they returned to Naples, they climbed Vesuvius and then sailed to Capri, another small island in the Bay of Naples where Haeckel hoped to see nature as an ‘interconnected whole’.

Haeckel packed an easel and watercolours and for good measure also his instruments and notebooks, but within a week of arriving in Capri he had embraced a new bohemian lifestyle. He was living his dreams, he admitted to Anna who was patiently waiting for her fiancé in Berlin. The microscope stayed in its box. Instead Haeckel was painting. He didn’t want to be a ‘microscoping worm’, he told Anna – how could he when nature in all its glory was calling him: ‘Outside! Outside!’ Only an ‘ossified scholar’ would be able to resist. Ever since Haeckel had read Humboldt’s Views of Nature as a boy, he had dreamed of this kind of ‘half wild life in nature’. Here on Capri, he was finally seeing the ‘delightful glory of the macro-cosmos’, he wrote to Anna. All he needed was a ‘faithful paintbrush’. He wanted to dedicate his life to this poetic world of light and colours. The crisis that Humboldt’s death had triggered was turning into a fully-fledged transformation.

His parents received similar letters, although with less emphasis on the wild aspects of his new life. Instead Haeckel told them about his possible future as an artist. He reminded them that Humboldt had written about the bond between art and science. With his artistic talent – to which, he assured his parents, other painters in Capri attested – and his botanical knowledge he believed that he was in a unique position to take up the gauntlet that Humboldt had thrown down. After all, landscape painting had been one of ‘Humboldt’s favourite interests’. Haeckel now announced that he wanted to be a painter who ‘strode with his paintbrush through all zones from the Arctic Ocean to the Equator’.

Back in Berlin, Haeckel’s father was not too pleased about these developments and dispatched a stern letter. For years he had watched his son’s fluctuating plans. He was not a rich man, he now reminded Haeckel, and ‘can’t have you travelling all over the world for years’. Why did his son always have to take everything to extremes – working, swimming, climbing, but also dreaming, hoping and doubting? ‘You must now cultivate your real job,’ Haeckel senior continued, not leaving any doubt where he saw his son’s future.

It was again Haeckel’s love for Anna that made him realize that his dream would have to remain a dream. In order to marry her, he would become a ‘tame’ professor instead of exploring the world with a paintbrush. In mid-September, a little more than four months after Humboldt’s death, Haeckel packed his bags and instruments to travel to Messina in Sicily to concentrate on his scientific work – but the weeks in Capri had changed him for ever. When the Sicilian fishermen brought buckets filled with seawater and alive with thousands of minute organisms, Haeckel saw them as a zoologist and as an artist. As he carefully placed drops of water under his microscope, new marvels revealed themselves. These tiny marine invertebrates looked like ‘delicate works of art’, he thought, made of colourful cut glass or gems. Instead of dreading the days behind the microscope, he was gripped by these ‘sea wonders’.

Every day he swam at dawn, when the sun lacquered the water surface red and nature glowed in its ‘most exquisite brilliance’, he wrote home. After the swim, he went to the fish market to pick up his daily seawater delivery but by 8 a.m. he was in his room where he worked until 5 p.m. After a quick meal followed by a brisk walk along the beach, he was back at his desk at 7.30 p.m. writing notes until midnight. The hard work paid off. By December, three months after his arrival in Sicily, Haeckel was certain that he had found the scientific project that would make his career: they were called radiolarians.

These minuscule single-celled marine organisms were about 1/1,000 of an inch and visible only under the microscope. Once magnified, the radiolarians revealed their stunning structure. Their exquisite mineral skeletons exhibited a complex pattern of symmetry, often with ray-like projections that gave them a floating appearance. Week after week, Haeckel identified new species and even new families. By early February he had discovered over sixty previously unknown species. Then, on 10 February 1860, the morning catch alone brought twelve new ones. He fell on his knees in front of his microscope, he wrote to Anna, and bowed to the benevolent sea gods and nymphs to thank them for their generous gifts.

This work was ‘made for me’, Haeckel now declared. It brought together his love for physical exercise, nature, science and art – from the joy of the early morning catch which he was now doing himself to the last pencil stroke of his drawings. The radiolarian revealed a new world to Haeckel, a world of order but also wonder – so ‘poetic and delightful’, he told Anna. By the end of March 1860, he had discovered more than one hundred new species and was ready to go home to work them up into a book.

Haeckel illustrated his zoological work with his own drawings of perfect scientific accuracy but also of remarkable beauty. It helped that he could look with one eye into his microscope while the other focused on his drawing board – a talent so unusual that his former professors said they had never seen someone capable of it. For Haeckel the act of drawing was the best method of understanding nature. With pencil and paintbrush, he said, he ‘penetrated deeper into the secret of her beauty’ than ever before; they were his tools of seeing and learning. The two souls in his breast had finally been united.

The radiolarians were so beautiful, Haeckel wrote to his old travel companion Allmers on his return to Germany, that he wondered if Allmers wanted to use them to decorate his studio – or even ‘create a new “style”!!’.2 He worked frantically on his drawings, and two years later, in 1862, he published a magnificent two-volume book: Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda Radiaria). As a result he was made an associate professor at the University of Jena, the small town where Humboldt had met Goethe more than half a century previously. In August 1862 Haeckel married Anna. He was blissfully happy. Without her, he said, he would have died like a plant without ‘life-giving sunlight’.

While Haeckel worked on Die Radiolarien, he had read a book that would change his life yet again: Darwin’s Origin of Species. Haeckel was struck by Darwin’s theory on evolution – it was ‘a completely crazy book’, he later recounted. In one great sweep the Origin of Species gave Haeckel the answers to how organisms had developed. Darwin’s book, Haeckel said, did ‘open a new world’. It provided a solution ‘to all problems, however knotty’, Haeckel wrote in a long and admiring letter to Darwin. With Origin of Species, Darwin replaced the belief of God’s divine creation of animals, plants and humans with the concept that they were products of natural processes – a revolutionary idea that shook religious doctrine to its core.

Origin of Species sent the scientific world into uproar. Many accused Darwin of heresy. Taken to its full conclusion, Darwin’s theory meant that humans were part of the same tree of life as all other organisms. A few months after the publication in England, it had come to a big public showdown in Oxford between the bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Darwin’s fiery supporter, the biologist and later president of the Royal Society, Thomas Huxley. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Wilberforce had provocatively asked Huxley if he was related to an ape on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side. Huxley had answered that he preferred to be descended from an ape rather than a bishop. The debates were controversial, exciting and radical.

The Origin of Species fell on fertile ground when Haeckel read it because he had been shaped since childhood by Humboldt’s concept of nature – and Cosmos already included many ‘pre-Darwinian sentiments’. Over the next decades Haeckel would become Darwin’s most ardent supporter in Germany.3 He was, as Anna said, ‘her German Darwin-man’, while Hermann Allmers teased Haeckel playfully about his ‘life filled with happy love and Darwinism’.

Then tragedy struck. On 16 February 1864, on Haeckel’s thirtieth birthday and the day he received a prestigious scientific prize for his radiolarian book, Anna died after a short illness which might have been appendicitis. They had been married for less than two years. Haeckel fell into a deep depression. ‘I am dead on the inside,’ he told Allmers, crushed by ‘bitter grief’. Anna’s death had destroyed all prospects of happiness, Haeckel declared. To escape, he threw himself into work. ‘I intend to dedicate my entire life’ to evolutionary theory, he wrote to Darwin.

He lived like a hermit, Haeckel told Darwin, and the only thing that occupied him was evolution. He was ready to take on the entire scientific world because Anna’s death had made him ‘immune to praise and blame’. To forget his pain, Haeckel worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for a whole year.

The result of his despair was the two-volume Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms) which was published in 1866 – 1,000 pages about evolution and morphology, the study of the structure and shape of organisms.4 Darwin described the book as the ‘most magnificent eulogium’ that the Origin of Species had ever received. It was an angry book in which Haeckel attacked those who refused to accept Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Haeckel reeled off a barrage of insults: Darwin’s critics wrote thick but ‘empty’ books; they were in a ‘scientific half sleep’ and lived a ‘life of dreams that was impoverished of thoughts’. Even Thomas Huxley – a man who called himself ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ – thought that Haeckel would have to tone it down a little if he wanted to produce an English edition. Haeckel, however, was not budging.

Radical reform of the sciences could not be done gently, Haeckel told Huxley. They would have to get their hands dirty and use ‘pitchforks’. Haeckel had written Generelle Morphologie at a moment of deep personal crisis, as he explained to Darwin, his bitterness about the world and about his life was woven into every sentence. Since Anna’s death Haeckel didn’t worry about his own reputation any more, he told Darwin: ‘long may my many enemies attack my work strongly’. They could maul him as much as they wanted, he couldn’t have cared less.

Generelle Morphologie was not only a rallying call for the new theory of evolution but also the book in which Haeckel first named Humboldt’s discipline: Oecologie, or ‘ecology’. Haeckel took the Greek word for household – oikos – and applied it to the natural world. All the earth’s organisms belonged together like a family occupying a dwelling; and like the members of a household they could conflict with, or assist, one another. Organic and inorganic nature made a ‘system of active forces’, he wrote in Generelle Morphologie, using Humboldt’s exact words. Haeckel took Humboldt’s idea of nature as a unified whole made up of complex interrelationships and gave it a name. Ecology, Haeckel said, was the ‘science of the relationships of an organism with its environment’.5

In the same year that Haeckel invented the word ‘ecology’, he also finally followed Humboldt and Darwin to distant shores. In October 1866, more than two years after Anna’s death, he travelled to Tenerife, the island that had taken on an almost mystical dimension for scientists ever since Humboldt had described it so seductively in Personal Narrative. It was time to fulfil what Haeckel called his ‘oldest and most favourite travel dream’. Almost seventy years after Humboldt had set sail and more than thirty years after Darwin had boarded the Beagle, Haeckel began his own voyage. Though three generations apart, they had all believed that science was more than a cerebral activity. Their science implied strenuous physical exertion because they were looking at flora and fauna – be they palms, lichens, barnacles, birds or marine invertebrates – within their natural habitats. Understanding ecology meant exploring new worlds teeming with life.

On his way to Tenerife, Haeckel stopped in England where he arranged to see Darwin at home at Down House in Kent, a short train ride from London. Haeckel had never met Humboldt, but now he had the opportunity to meet his other hero. On Sunday, 21 October, at 11.30 a.m. Darwin’s coachman picked up Haeckel at Bromley, the local train station, and drove him to an ivy-clad country house where the fifty-seven-year-old Darwin was waiting at the front door. Haeckel was so nervous that he forgot the little English he knew. He and Darwin shook hands for a long time, with Darwin saying repeatedly how glad he was to see him. Haeckel was, as Darwin’s daughter Henrietta recounted, stunned into a ‘dead silence’. As they strolled through the garden along the Sandwalk where Darwin did so much of his thinking, Haeckel slowly recovered and began to talk. He spoke English with a strong German accent, stumbling a little but in a clear enough manner for the two scientists to enjoy a long conversation about evolution and foreign travels.