The Invention of Nature

Though Haeckel obeyed his father’s wishes and continued his medical studies, he never intended to practise as a doctor. He enjoyed botany and comparative anatomy, marine invertebrates and microscopes, mountain climbing and swimming, painting and drawing, but loathed medicine. His appetite for Humboldt’s work increased the more he read. When he visited his parents, he took Views of Nature with him and asked his mother to buy him a copy of Personal Narrative

because, he said, he was ‘obsessed’ with it. From the university’s library in Würzburg he borrowed dozens of Humboldt’s books, ranging from the botanical volumes to the large folio edition of Vues des Cordillères with its spectacular engravings of Latin American landscapes and monuments – ‘preciously sumptuous editions’, as he called them. He also asked his parents to send him as a Christmas present the atlas that had been published to accompany Cosmos

. It was easier for him, he explained, to understand and memorize through images rather than words.

During a visit to Berlin, Haeckel made a pilgrimage to the Humboldt family estate, Tegel. It was a glorious summer’s day even if Humboldt was nowhere to be seen. Haeckel bathed in the lake where his hero had once swum and sat at the water’s edge until the moon cast a silver veil across the surface. This was the closest he had ever come to Humboldt.

He wanted to follow Humboldt’s footsteps and see South America. This would be the only way to reconcile the two conflicting souls in his chest: the ‘man of reason’ and the artist ruled by ‘feeling and poetry’. The only profession that combined science with emotions and adventure was that of an explorer-naturalist, Haeckel was certain. He dreamed ‘day and night’ of a great voyage and began to make plans. First he would take his medical degree and then find a position as a ship’s surgeon. Once he had reached the tropics, he would leave the ship and begin his ‘Robinsonian project’. The advantage of this scheme was, Haeckel told his increasingly worried parents, that it would force him to finish his studies in Würzburg. He would do anything as long as it meant going ‘far, far into the world’.

Haeckel’s parents, though, had different ideas and insisted that their son work as a doctor in Berlin. Initially Haeckel did as he was asked, but quietly tried to sabotage their plans. When he set up his practice in Berlin, he introduced rather eccentric opening hours. Patients could only see him for consultations between five and six o’clock in the morning. Unsurprisingly, he had just half a dozen patients during his year as a doctor – although, as he proudly announced, none died in his care.

In the end it was Haeckel’s love for his fiancée Anna that made him consider a more conventional career. Haeckel called her his ‘truly German forest child’. Instead of material things – clothes, furniture or fine jewellery – Anna enjoyed the simple joys of life such as a walk in the countryside or lying in a meadow among wildflowers. She was, as Haeckel said, ‘completely unspoiled and pure’. Serendipity had it that she shared her birthday with Humboldt – 14 September – which was also the date that the couple announced their engagement. Haeckel decided to become a zoology professor. It was a respectable profession, and he wouldn’t have to deal with his ‘insurmountable revulsion’ at the ‘diseased body’. To make his mark in the scientific world, he simply needed to decide on a research project.

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.