------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II AT THE UNIVERSITY It was botany itself that thwarted all these designs. The examination had passed off happily. Rooms were taken at Jena, at the Easter of 1852, for the advanced study under Schleiden. Then the indefatigable collector had an adventure on a cold March day. He spent hours in the wet meadows by the river Saale, searching for a rare plant, the squill (_Scilla bifolia_). He met with the fate of the angler in the story, who fell into the water in his haste to secure his big pike. He landed the fish, but not himself. The plant was found, but Haeckel’s zeal was punished with a severe rheumatism. He had to go home to his parents at Berlin to be tended. At Berlin he begins his studies, and the event to some extent decides his career. It would now be many years before he would see Jena again; and through his efforts it would become one of the leading schools, not of botany, but of zoology—a school of _philosophical_ zoology, however, in the sense of Schleiden. Berlin had secured a botanist of the first rank a year before, Alexander Braun. He, too, was a thoughtful botanist, who would in his way agree very well with Schleiden. He was convinced that botany did not wholly consist in the determination of new plant forms and the almost fruitless effort to set up a system on which all particular diagnoses would be rigidly played as on a piano. He believed that there must be a more profound conception of it, which would take “form,” as such, as one of its problems, and would aim, not at the formation of as large a collection as possible, but at the construction of a science for which Goethe had long ago found a name—morphology, or the science of forms. It happened that Braun was a friendly visitor at the house of Haeckel’s parents at Berlin. The now convalescent freshman became devoted to him, body and soul; they became close friends, not merely master and pupil. Berlin at that time afforded many an opportunity for practical botanising. Rare marsh-plants then flourished in the bed of the Spree, which has since been cleared. The Botanical Garden was full of good things. Haeckel used to tell with pride, long afterwards, with what readiness he flung himself into the work, practical as well as theoretical, on these excursions with Professor Braun. “On one of our botanical expeditions we wanted to get a floating chara from a pond. Braun took off his boots in his usual way in order to wade to the spot. But I was before him. I quickly undressed, forgot my naughty rheumatism, and swam to the spot, to bring him a quantity of the plant he wanted. That was my first piece of heroism, perhaps my greatest.”