I turn to the thick volume of Haeckel’s _Monograph on the Medusæ_. Part I.: “System of the Medusæ:” with an atlas of forty beautiful plates: published by Gustav Fischer, of Jena, in 1879. Few people except zoologists with a technical interest in it have ever opened this voluminous work—why should they? It is a heavy work, with dry diagnoses. The author seems to be far away from all general questions, if ever he was, in the utter stillness of his study. This pure accumulation of matter for truth’s sake does not reach the ear of the world. It lays up material for remote days, before which the individual fades away; it is merely catalogued material of the most technical character. Yet, as I turn over the pages, I seem to see a little image from time to time that is almost like the rose-red or golden-brown medusæ in the sterile, illimitable ocean. In truth neither ocean nor book is sterile; but they are grey and broad. And just as the swimming medusa gladdens me in the one, so a little personal trait of the author does in the other. It is in the choice of the Latin names. A little crown is woven that unites æsthetics and science. I find splendid names, invented by the Professor, on all sides. But I notice that his heart was in these things. He has discovered new species of medusæ, and must christen them. As he turns over his Latin or Greek lexicon a ray of humanity steals into the most severe scientific soul at such moments. I read that a disco-medusa is called the _Nausicaa phæacum_: “I observed the _Nausicaa phæacum_ in April, 1877, at Corfu, on the shore of Phæaca, in the heart of the Nausicaa.” A cyaneid is given the fine name of the _Melusina formosa_. It is noted, with great regret, that “so fine and classic a name for a medusa” as _Oceania_ must be struck out on scientific grounds. Amongst descriptions of species in a severe scientific tongue that unnerves the timid reader, amongst gonods, styles, perradial bundles of tentacles, and ocellar bulbs, we find, _apropos_ of the medusa, _Lizzia Elisabethæ_: “As Forbes dedicated the pretty genus _Lizzia blondina_ to a ‘blond Elizabeth,’ I do the same, and wish to honour, not only St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, but also the ‘blond Elizabeth’ of Immermann and my own dear daughter Elizabeth.”