A History of Science — Volume 5Williams, Henry Smith
History
A History of Science — Volume 5
Williams, Henry Smith
Science -- History
It was in 1861 that young Dr. Haeckel came first to Jena as a teacher.
He had made a tentative effort at the practice of medicine in Berlin,
then very gladly had turned from a distasteful pursuit to the field of
pure science. His first love, before he took up the study of medicine,
had been botany, though pictorial art, then as later, competed with
science for his favorable attention. But the influence of his great
teacher, Johannes Müller, together with his medical studies, had turned
his attention more directly to the animal rather than vegetable life,
and when he left medicine it was to turn explicitly to zoology as a life
study. Here he believed he should find a wider field than in art, which
he loved almost as well, and which, it may be added, he has followed all
his life as a dilettante of much more than amateurish skill. Had he so
elected, Haeckel might have made his mark in art quite as definitely
as he has made it in science. Indeed, even as the case stands, his
draughtsman's skill has been more than a mere recreation to him, for
without his beautiful drawings, often made and reproduced in color, his
classical monographs on various orders of living creatures would have
lacked much of their present value.
Moreover, quite aside from these merely technical drawings, Professor
Haeckel has made hundreds of paintings purely for recreation and the
love of it, illustrating--and that too often with true artistic feeling
for both form and color--the various lands to which his zoological
quests have carried him, such as Sicily, the Canaries, Egypt, and India.
From India alone, after a four-months' visit, Professor Haeckel brought
back two hundred fair-sized water-colors, a feat which speaks at once
for his love of art and his amazing industry.
I dwell upon this phase of Professor Haeckel's character and temperament
from the very outset because I wish it constantly to be borne in mind,
in connection with some of the doctrines to be mentioned presently, that
here we have to do with no dry-as-dust scientist, cold and soulless, but
with a broad, versatile, imaginative mind, one that links the scientific
and the artistic temperaments in rarest measure. Charles Darwin, with
whose name the name of Haeckel will always be linked, told with regret
that in his later years he had become so steeped in scientific facts
that he had lost all love for or appreciation of art or music. There has
been no such mental warping and atrophy in the mind of Ernst Haeckel.
Yet there is probably no man living to-day whose mind contains a larger
store of technical scientific facts than his, nor a man who has enriched
zoology with a larger number of new data, the result of direct personal
observation in field or laboratory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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