From the turmoil Haeckel withdrew once more to his beloved Italy. There was another reason for his flight. His seventieth birthday was approaching. He had declared at the banquet given in his honour on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, that if he lived for the seventieth he would “bury himself in some dark corner of the Thuringian forest, far away from all festivities.” Strenuous and exacting as the ten years had been, he now found himself on the threshold of his eighth decade of life. His wife, also, was ailing, and they both proceeded to the Italian Riviera at the beginning of the winter. Few of his friends were informed where he was. “I want,” he wrote to me, “to pass my seventieth birthday in peace.” He settled at Rapallo, and at once commenced his favourite fishing for the tiny inhabitants of the Mediterranean. The “cloistral quietness” of the little town, the daily prospect of the blue Mediterranean, “the solitary walks in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Apennines, and the uplifting sight of their forest-crowned mountain-altars” restored his freshness of spirit. Once more a vast labour lay before him. He had promised a work that would answer all biological questions addressed to him in the 5,000 letters of his correspondents. He had all the queries, all the criticisms of his views, all the latest literature of the subject, to digest into a compact volume. The result was a new work of 557 pages, _The Wonders of Life_, a remarkable summary of his zoological and botanical knowledge, with excursions into psychology, suicide, lunacy, ethnography, theology, and ethics. Its twenty solid and well-arranged chapters were written in four months. “Promptly at 5,” he wrote in December, “I am awakened by the bells of the church hard by. I write continuously until 12. After a frugal lunch and a short rest, the afternoon is devoted to a walk or to water-colour sketches. The longer days allow me to sit and paint in the open air until five. Our quiet evenings, from 5 to 10, are spent in reading and in writing letters. The interruption for dinner, from 7 to 8, gives us an opportunity to exchange jokes over our ‘cloistral life.’” Thus the veteran naturalist, of “notoriously licentious life” (the words of the Glasgow preacher were spoken at this very period), approached his eighth decade of life—of work.