The Invention of Nature

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.