The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Origin of Species sent the scientific world into uproar. Many accused Darwin of heresy. Taken to its full conclusion, Darwin’s theory meant that humans were part of the same tree of life as all other organisms. A few months after the publication in England, it had come to a big public showdown in Oxford between the bishop Samuel Wilberforce and Darwin’s fiery supporter, the biologist and later president of the Royal Society, Thomas Huxley. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Wilberforce had provocatively asked Huxley if he was related to an ape on his grandmother’s or grandfather’s side. Huxley had answered that he preferred to be descended from an ape rather than a bishop. The debates were controversial, exciting and radical.

  The Origin of Species fell on fertile ground when Haeckel read it because he had been shaped since childhood by Humboldt’s concept of nature – and Cosmos already included many ‘pre-Darwinian sentiments’. Over the next decades Haeckel would become Darwin’s most ardent supporter in Germany.3 He was, as Anna said, ‘her German Darwin-man’, while Hermann Allmers teased Haeckel playfully about his ‘life filled with happy love and Darwinism’.

  Then tragedy struck. On 16 February 1864, on Haeckel’s thirtieth birthday and the day he received a prestigious scientific prize for his radiolarian book, Anna died after a short illness which might have been appendicitis. They had been married for less than two years. Haeckel fell into a deep depression. ‘I am dead on the inside,’ he told Allmers, crushed by ‘bitter grief’. Anna’s death had destroyed all prospects of happiness, Haeckel declared. To escape, he threw himself into work. ‘I intend to dedicate my entire life’ to evolutionary theory, he wrote to Darwin.

  He lived like a hermit, Haeckel told Darwin, and the only thing that occupied him was evolution. He was ready to take on the entire scientific world because Anna’s death had made him ‘immune to praise and blame’. To forget his pain, Haeckel worked eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, for a whole year.

  The result of his despair was the two-volume Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms) which was published in 1866 – 1,000 pages about evolution and morphology, the study of the structure and shape of organisms.4 Darwin described the book as the ‘most magnificent eulogium’ that the Origin of Species had ever received. It was an angry book in which Haeckel attacked those who refused to accept Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Haeckel reeled off a barrage of insults: Darwin’s critics wrote thick but ‘empty’ books; they were in a ‘scientific half sleep’ and lived a ‘life of dreams that was impoverished of thoughts’. Even Thomas Huxley – a man who called himself ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ – thought that Haeckel would have to tone it down a little if he wanted to produce an English edition. Haeckel, however, was not budging.

  Radical reform of the sciences could not be done gently, Haeckel told Huxley. They would have to get their hands dirty and use ‘pitchforks’. Haeckel had written Generelle Morphologie at a moment of deep personal crisis, as he explained to Darwin, his bitterness about the world and about his life was woven into every sentence. Since Anna’s death Haeckel didn’t worry about his own reputation any more, he told Darwin: ‘long may my many enemies attack my work strongly’. They could maul him as much as they wanted, he couldn’t have cared less.

  Generelle Morphologie was not only a rallying call for the new theory of evolution but also the book in which Haeckel first named Humboldt’s discipline: Oecologie, or ‘ecology’. Haeckel took the Greek word for household – oikos – and applied it to the natural world. All the earth’s organisms belonged together like a family occupying a dwelling; and like the members of a household they could conflict with, or assist, one another. Organic and inorganic nature made a ‘system of active forces’, he wrote in Generelle Morphologie, using Humboldt’s exact words. Haeckel took Humboldt’s idea of nature as a unified whole made up of complex interrelationships and gave it a name. Ecology, Haeckel said, was the ‘science of the relationships of an organism with its environment’.5

  In the same year that Haeckel invented the word ‘ecology’, he also finally followed Humboldt and Darwin to distant shores. In October 1866, more than two years after Anna’s death, he travelled to Tenerife, the island that had taken on an almost mystical dimension for scientists ever since Humboldt had described it so seductively in Personal Narrative. It was time to fulfil what Haeckel called his ‘oldest and most favourite travel dream’. Almost seventy years after Humboldt had set sail and more than thirty years after Darwin had boarded the Beagle, Haeckel began his own voyage. Though three generations apart, they had all believed that science was more than a cerebral activity. Their science implied strenuous physical exertion because they were looking at flora and fauna – be they palms, lichens, barnacles, birds or marine invertebrates – within their natural habitats. Understanding ecology meant exploring new worlds teeming with life.

  On his way to Tenerife, Haeckel stopped in England where he arranged to see Darwin at home at Down House in Kent, a short train ride from London. Haeckel had never met Humboldt, but now he had the opportunity to meet his other hero. On Sunday, 21 October, at 11.30 a.m. Darwin’s coachman picked up Haeckel at Bromley, the local train station, and drove him to an ivy-clad country house where the fifty-seven-year-old Darwin was waiting at the front door. Haeckel was so nervous that he forgot the little English he knew. He and Darwin shook hands for a long time, with Darwin saying repeatedly how glad he was to see him. Haeckel was, as Darwin’s daughter Henrietta recounted, stunned into a ‘dead silence’. As they strolled through the garden along the Sandwalk where Darwin did so much of his thinking, Haeckel slowly recovered and began to talk. He spoke English with a strong German accent, stumbling a little but in a clear enough manner for the two scientists to enjoy a long conversation about evolution and foreign travels.

  Darwin was exactly as Haeckel had envisaged him. Older, softly spoken and kind, Darwin exuded an aura of wisdom, Haeckel thought, much as he imagined Socrates or Aristotle. The whole Darwin family welcomed him so warmly that it had felt like coming home, he told friends in Jena. That visit, Haeckel later said, was one of the most ‘unforgettable’ moments of his life. When he left the next day, he was more than ever convinced that nature could only be seen as ‘one unified whole – a completely interrelated “kingdom of life” ’.

  Then it was time to leave. Haeckel had arranged to meet the three assistants whom he had hired to help with his research (one scientist from Bonn and two of his students from Jena) in Lisbon from where they sailed to the Canary Islands. Once the four men landed in Tenerife, Haeckel rushed to see the sights that Humboldt had described. And of course he had to follow Humboldt’s footsteps up to the summit of Pico del Teide. As Haeckel climbed through snow and icy winds, he fainted from altitude sickness, and his descent was half stumbling, half falling. But he had made it, he proudly wrote home. That he had seen what Humboldt had seen was ‘highly satisfying’. From Tenerife, he and his three assistants then sailed to the volcanic island of Lanzarote, where they spent three months working on their various zoological projects. Haeckel concentrated on radiolarians and medusae, while his assistants investigated fish, sponges, worms and molluscs. Though the landscape was barren, the sea here was alive, Haeckel said, it was ‘a great animal soup’.

  When Haeckel returned to Jena, in April 1867, he was calmer and at peace. Anna would remain the love of his life and even many years later, after he had remarried, the anniversary of her death always made him mournful. ‘On this sad day,’ he wrote thirty-five years later, ‘I am lost.’ But he had learned to accept and live with Anna’s death.

  Over the next few decades Haeckel travelled a great deal – mainly within Europe but also to Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Java and Sumatra. He still taught students at Jena, but he was happiest when travelling. His passion for adventure never disappeared. In 1900, aged sixty-six, he went on an expedition to Java, the mere prospect of which, his friends commented, ‘rejuvenated’ him. During these exploratio
ns, he collected specimens but also sketched. Like Humboldt, Haeckel thought that the tropics were the best place to understand the fundamentals of ecology.

  A single tree in Java’s rainforest, Haeckel wrote, illustrated the relationships of animals and plants with each other and with their environment in the most striking way: with epiphyte orchids that clung with their roots to the tree’s branches and insects that had become perfectly adapted pollinators or climbers that had won the race for light in the tree’s crown – they were all proof of a diverse ecosystem. Here in the tropics, Haeckel said, the ‘struggle of survival’ was so intense that the weapons that flora and fauna had developed were ‘exceptionally rich’ and varied. This was the place to see how plants and animals lived together with ‘friends and enemies, their symbionts and parasites’, Haeckel wrote. It was Humboldt’s web of life.

  During the years in Jena, Haeckel also co-founded a scientific magazine in honour of Humboldt and Darwin. Dedicated to evolutionary theory and ecological ideas, it was called Kosmos. He also wrote and published lavish monographs about sea creatures such as calcareous sponges, jellyfish and more on radiolarians, as well as travel accounts and several books that further popularized Darwin’s theories. Many of Haeckel’s books included his sumptuous illustrations, mostly presented as a series rather than as individual images. For Haeckel these depictions showed the narrative of nature – his compelling way of making evolution ‘visible’. Art had become a tool through which Haeckel conveyed scientific knowledge.

  At the turn of the century, Haeckel published a series of booklets called Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) – taken together it was a collection of one hundred exquisite illustrations that would shape the stylistic language of Art Nouveau. For more than fifty years, Haeckel told a friend, he had followed Humboldt’s ideas but Art Forms in Nature pushed them even further by introducing scientific subjects to artists and designers. Most of Haeckel’s illustrations revealed the spectacular beauty of tiny organisms that were only visible through the microscope – ‘hidden treasures’, as he wrote. In Art Forms in Nature, Haeckel instructed craftsmen, artists and architects how to use these new ‘beautiful motifs’ correctly by adding an epilogue with tables in which he graded the different organisms according to their aesthetic importance, adding comments such as: ‘extremely rich’, ‘very diverse and meaningful’ or ‘of ornamental design’.

  Published between 1899 and 1904, Art Forms in Nature became hugely influential. At a time when urbanization, industrialization and technological advance distanced people from the land, Haeckel’s drawings provided a palette of natural forms and motifs that became a vocabulary for those artists, architects and craftsmen who tried to reunite man and nature through art.

  By the turn of the century, Europe had entered the so-called Machine Age. Factories were powered by electric engines and mass production was driving economies in Europe and the United States. Germany had long lagged behind Britain, but after the creation of the German Reich in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and with the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, as the German emperor, the country had caught up at a dizzying speed. By the time Haeckel published the first issue of Art Forms in Nature in 1899, Germany had joined Britain and the United States as an economic world leader.

  By then the first automobiles were driving along German roads and a web of railways connected the industrial centres at the Ruhr with the large port cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. Coal and steel were produced in ever growing quantities and cities were mushrooming around the industrial hubs. The first electric power station had opened in Berlin in 1887. Germany’s chemical industry had become the most important and advanced in the world, producing synthetic dyes, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers. Unlike Britain, Germany had polytechnics and factory research laboratories which nurtured a generation of new scientists and engineers. These were institutions that focused on the practical application of science rather than on academic discovery.

  Many of the growing numbers of city-dwellers, Haeckel wrote, were desperate to get away from the ‘restless hustle and bustle’ and from the ‘factories’ murky clouds of smoke’. They escaped to the seaside, to shaded forests and to rugged mountain slopes in the hope of finding themselves in nature. The Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the disturbed relationship between man and nature by taking aesthetic inspiration from the natural world. They ‘now learned from nature’ and not from their teachers, one German designer commented. The introduction of these nature motifs into interiors and architecture became a redemptive step that brought the organic into the increasingly mechanical world.

  The famous French glass artist Émile Gallé, for example, owned Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature and insisted that the ‘marine harvest’ from the oceans had turned scientific laboratories into studios for the decorative arts. The ‘crystalline jellyfish’, Gallé said in May 1900, brought new ‘nuances and curves into glass’. The new stylistic language of Art Nouveau infused everything with elements borrowed from nature: from skyscrapers to jewellery, from posters to candlesticks and from furniture to textiles. Sinuous ornaments twisted in tendrilled floral lines on etched glass doors and furniture makers crafted table legs and armrests in branch-like curves.

  These organic movements and lines gave Art Nouveau its particular style. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí magnified Haeckel’s marine organisms into banisters and arches. Giant sea urchins decorated his stained-glass windows, and the huge ceiling lamps that he designed looked like nautilus shells. Enormous clumps of seaweed intertwined with algae and marine invertebrates gave shape to Gaudí’s rooms, staircases and windows. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, Louis Sullivan, the so-called ‘father of skyscrapers’, also turned to nature for inspiration. Sullivan owned several of Haeckel’s books and believed that art created a union between the artist’s soul and that of nature. The façades of his buildings were decorated with stylized motifs from flora and fauna. American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany was also influenced by Haeckel. The almost ethereal diaphanous qualities of algae and jellyfish made them perfect for his glass objects. Ornamental medusae were slung around Tiffany vases, and his design studio even produced a gold and platinum ‘seaweed’ necklace.

  Binet’s Porte Monumentale at the Paris World Fair in 1900 (Illustration Credit 22.2)

  Haeckel’s radiolarians that inspired Binet’s gate – in particular, those in the middle row (Illustration Credit 22.3)

  In late August 1900, when Haeckel travelled from Jena to Java, he stopped briefly in Paris to visit the World Fair where he walked through one of his radiolarians. The French architect René Binet had used Haeckel’s images of the microscopic sea creatures as an inspiration for the Porte Monumentale, the huge metal entrance gate that he had designed for the fair. In the previous year Binet had written to Haeckel that ‘everything about it’ – from the smallest detail to the general design – ‘has been inspired by your studies.’ The fair made Art Nouveau famous across the world, and almost 50 million visitors walked through Haeckel’s magnified radiolarian.

  Binet himself later published a book called Esquisses Décoratives (Decorative Sketches) which showed how Haeckel’s illustrations could be translated into interior decoration. Tropical jellyfish became lamps, single-celled organisms transmuted into light switches and microscopic views of cell tissues turned into wallpaper patterns. Architects and designers, Binet urged, should ‘turn to the great laboratory of Nature’.

  Corals, jellyfish and algae moved into the home, and Haeckel’s half-joking suggestion to Allmers, four decades previously, about using his radiolarian sketches from Italy to invent a new style had become true. In Jena, Haeckel had named his house Villa Medusa6 after his beloved jellyfish and decorated it accordingly. The ceiling rosette in the dining room, for example, was based on his own drawing of a medusa that he had discovered in Sri Lanka.

  As humankind dismantled the natural world into e
ver smaller parts – down to cells, molecules, atoms and then electrons – Haeckel believed that this fragmented world had to be reconciled. Humboldt had always talked about the unity of nature, but Haeckel took this idea a step further. He became an ardent proponent of ‘monism’ – the idea that there was no division between the organic and the inorganic world. Monism turned explicitly against the concept of a dualism between mind and matter. This idea of unity replaced God, and with this, monism became the most important ersatz religion at the turn of the twentieth century.

  Binet’s designs for electric light switches which borrowed heavily from Haeckel’s drawings (Illustration Credit 22.4)

  Haeckel’s drawing of the medusa that was painted on the ceiling at Villa Medusa (Illustration Credit 22.5)

  Haeckel explained the philosophical foundation of this view of the world in his book Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe) which was published in 1899, the same year as the first issue of his Art Forms in Nature. It became a huge international bestseller, with 450,000 copies sold in Germany alone. Welträthsel was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew and became the most influential popular science book at the turn of the century. In Welträthsel Haeckel wrote about the soul, the body and the unity of nature; about knowledge and faith; and about science and religion. It became the bible of monism.