No one can understand the greatness of a man like Ernst Haeckel who has not learned this melody. Nature is not a flat surface: it is an ocean. When Columbus crossed the seas in his three frail barques long ago to seek a new world in the distant haze, he little dreamed that the gray waters buried other new worlds a thousand yards beneath his keel—worlds of the deep-sea, into which our age has slowly dipped with its dredges. So we in turn may run our eye over the blue surface of nature, and think of its mysterious gold-lands and spice-islands, without suspicion of all that outspreads beneath our keel. Yet that glorious day on which Columbus found “his land” is an inspiration to us, his remote grandchildren. The life we are going to examine will bring before us such a morning of discovery. Columbus went in quest of Zipangu (as he called Japan), and he found America. Not one of us, however gifted he be, can be quite sure that, in leading humanity, he is not sailing into another such heroic error. Let us say that at once to all, friends and opponents. America or Zipangu—let it be so. Perhaps any man might have found Zipangu, while only the genius could reach America. * * * * * When Gustav Freytag, who had a most happy quality for writing memoirs, was composing his admirable _Pictures from the Past of Germany_, he sought in each period some prominent man of plain and downright character, yet who had something typical of his age in his sentiments, as if the time-spirit spoke through him. In this quest he twice (in the fourth volume, for the period from the close of the eighteenth century to the Wars of Freedom) lit upon earlier members of Haeckel’s family. The first was Haeckel’s grandfather on the mother’s side, Christoph Sethe; the second was his father, Councillor Haeckel.