The kindly old man consented to one more year of quite extravagant study, in which all was to come right. It was to be a year of travel, in Italy. He was to devote himself to the study of marine animals, not merely for pleasure, but earnestly enough for him to find a basis for his life in the result. This he succeeded in doing. Like the children of fortune, who at the very moment when they cannot see a step before them make a move that the Philistine regards as the safest and last refuge, Haeckel becomes engaged that very year to his cousin, Anna Sethe. After that, in January, 1859, he goes down to the coast. He makes for the blue Mediterranean, which he already knows will prove anything but an “unprofitable sea” for him. He will conjure up treasures of science from its crystal depths with his Müller-net; then on to fortune, position, marriage, and the future. The fates have added a world-wide repute, if they have denied many a comfort. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III THE RADIOLARIA In the January of 1859 Haeckel, then in his twenty-fifth year, came to Italy with the determination “to do it thoroughly.” By the autumn the body of the peninsula had been covered down to Naples, Capri, and Ischia. The winter, until April, 1860, was spent at Messina. There are plenty of very strenuous students, later Privy Councillors as well as archæologists and zoologists, who find a year in Italy a very simple matter. They arrive, make the due round of sights, and then at once disappear into some library or institute, burying themselves like moles in some special work or other, just as they would do at home. The only time you can see them is over their Munich beer in the evening; and if there are a number of them together they smoke their cigars and sing a German student’s song, as they would do at home. These good folk have very different dispositions behind their goggles, but they have never been lit up by the fire of Goethe. They are quite content to write home like the churlish Herder; Italy is pretty enough in Goethe’s writings, but one ought not to go there oneself. The modern scholar of this type may add that the cigars are bad and beer dear. Very different was Haeckel’s verdict. “In Sicily I was nearly thrown out of my line and made a landscape-painter.” The æsthetic man in him was the first to lift up his arms with vigour under this new, free, inspiring sun. His words are no idle phrase. The moment he tried it Haeckel discovered that he had a genius for landscape-painting. Even in regard to this gift we see the truth of what I have already said in other connections; the sternest materialists and scientific revolutionaries of the nineteenth century were men of considerable artistic power. There was the solid Vogt, a painter and poet; Moleschott, the soul-comrade of Hermann Hettner;