The Strait of Messina is the pearl of Italy. In my opinion it is finer than Naples. The huge volcano and the deep blue strip of water, that seems to be confined between the white coasts like some fabulous giant-stream, give a feeling of sublimity beside which the Bay of Naples seems but an idyll in the memory. The colours are more vivid; you think you would catch hold of the blue bodily if you put your hand in the water. It is a land of ancient myths. The Cyclops hammer their work in Etna. Scylla and Charybdis lurk in the Strait. Once, in the days of Homer, when the sun of civilisation still lay on a corner of Asia, a dim Münchhausen-world was lived here, such as we find to-day in the heart of Africa or New Guinea. But times changed. Zoologists came and fished with Müller-nets for tiny transparent sea-creatures in the gentle periodic currents, that may once have given rise to the legend of Scylla and Charybdis. There is no place more favourable for the purpose than the harbour of Messina. The basin is open only at one spot, towards the north. The westerly wind is cut off from the town by the mountains, and can do no harm. Even the detested southern wind, the sirocco, that lashes the Strait till it is white with foam, cannot enter. There is only the north wind that drives the water into the basin. The waves it brings in are full of millions of sea-animals, which accumulate in the _cul-de-sac_ of the harbour. In fact, if the sirocco has previously been blowing in the Strait and gathered great swarms of animals from the southern parts at the mouth of the harbour, and then the north wind drives them all inside, the whole of the water seems to be alive with them. If you dip a glass in it, you do not get water, but a sort of “animal stew,” the living things making up more of the bulk than the fluid—little crystalline creatures, medusæ, salpæ, crustacea, vermalia, and others of many kinds. It was at this classic spot that Haeckel would lay the foundation of his fame as a zoologist, by the study of a group of minute creatures that appealed equally to the æsthetic sense by the mysterious beauty of their forms. There can be little doubt that we can see in this, not only a fortunate accident, but also the play of some hidden affinity. In such a spot the artist in Haeckel could compromise with the zoologist. His æsthetic nature had revelled in landscape, peasantry, and song. Now the Müller-net and the microscope revealed a new world of hidden beauty that none had appreciated before him. In devoting himself to it he was still half engrossed in his quest of beauty; but the other half of him was rapidly attaining a mastery of serious zoology.