Ernst Haeckel was born at Potsdam, but in the same year the father was transferred to Merseburg, where the child was brought up. It was not his destiny to be a child of Berlin. Saxony remained essentially his home in many respects. We can always see in him something of this home that looks down on its children from its great green hills. The cold lines of the streets of the metropolis and the melancholy of the Brandenburg pine-forests cannot be traced in him. In later years Berlin assumed more and more in his thoughts the shape of an antipodal city. His works are full of the sharpest strictures on Berlin science. It was at an earlier date the city of Ehrenberg and Reichert, whom he did not love; later it was associated with Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, who gradually became his bitterest opponents. But he detested it generally as the home of Privy Councillors, of science in the Procrustean bed of official supervision. When he compared what he himself had done at Jena with the slenderest possible appliances, and what, in his judgment, had been done by the heads of the Berlin schools in their princely institutes, he would humorously—though it has been taken very seriously—lay down the “natural law” that the magnitude of the scientific achievement is in inverse proportion to the size of the scientific institute. The official people at Berlin did not fail to make a biting retort to these Radical strictures—that in 1881, when he wanted to go to Ceylon, he was formally refused assistance by the Berlin Academy from the travelling-fee (then at liberty) attached to the Humboldt foundation. He made the journey without their assistance, and had the splendid revenge of giving us, in the description of this very voyage, the most brilliant account of the tropics that has appeared in Germany since the time of Humboldt. It was a finer contribution to the general ideal of the Humboldt foundation than the timid payment of a hundred pounds could have secured. However, we are anticipating. Before that time he was to spend a short but happy period at Berlin in the fifties, in the best days of his youth—a Berlin of a different scientific character from the present city, being at once less pretentious and more profound, whichever the reader chooses to dwell on.