A Plate of Jellyfish | Lucy Jakub | The New York Review of Books

In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, a small, illustrated treatise on the world seen through his simple compound microscope. Most of his subjects could be found on the kitchen table: the mold on a piece of cheese, the weave of the tablecloth, the cells in a sliver of cork. His most famous image is of a magnified flea. His engravings captivated and unnerved the public; the kitchen table was forever changed.

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Ernst Haeckel and his assistant Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay, posing as naturalists in the Canary Islands, 1866; click to enlarge

Two hundred years later, twenty-five-year-old Ernst Haeckel paddled a rowboat through the Gulf of Messina, sieving zooplankton with a fine mesh net, and writing home to his fiancée with as much excitement as if he were panning for gold. Armed with a x1,000 microscope, the best money could buy in 1859, he was cataloging radiolarians, taking up the study of his late mentor, Johannes Müller. Radiolarians are single-celled marine organisms named for their radial forms, of between a tenth and two tenths of a millimeter in diameter, and armored by silicate skeletons as variable as snowflakes.

Haeckel’s name has not endured as well as the words that he coined—among them, phylum, ecology, and stem cell. Yet he was a giant of nineteenth-century scientific thought, and responsible for the contagious spread of Darwin’s theory of evolution in Germany. An atheist iconoclast, he took up a crusade against religious dogma in scientific fields, tearing a rift between fundamentalist faith and Darwinism that rages today. His take on evolutionary theory, known as the biogenetic law or recapitulation, suggested that the evolution of a species was reflected in the individual’s embryonic development; the similarities between embryos of different species might point to their common ancestral origin. His research led him to speculate on human origins, and he was the first to draw out trees of evolutionary relationships between species. Recapitulation was a flawed concept, and so were Haeckel’s ideas about racial hierarchy, which the Nazis would readily co-opt. His evolutionary trees look like oaks, because Haeckel was also an artist, and the quality of the visuals was important to him.

Ernst Haeckel: “Pedigree of Man,” *The Evolution of Man*, plate 15, 1879

A new book by Taschen has gathered the art from Haeckel’s monographs on the taxonomy and anatomy of marine organisms. Both art book and textbook, The Art and Science of Ernst Haeckel is coauthored by Rainer Willmann and Julia Voss, specialists in phylogenetics and German art history, respectively. Under its weight of fourteen pounds, my arms were jelly after hauling it home. But anything lighter would not do justice to the prolific output of Haeckel’s career.

It was while preparing his research on radiolaria that Haeckel read On the Origin of Species in translation. In the varying forms and complexities of the radiolarians, Haeckel saw evidence for the diversification of species. His first book, Monographie der Radiolarien, was published in 1862, complete with thirty-five sumptuously engraved plates based on his drawings of 144 new species he had observed on his trip to Italy; with one eye to the microscope and one hand sketching what he saw, the speed and perfectionism of his renderings are extraordinary. The book, published for a mass audience, was a great success in Germany and abroad. The anatomist Max Schultze wrote of Radiolarien, “I find myself undecided as to whether to feel more astonished by nature itself and its capacity to bring forth such diversity and beauty of forms, or by the hand of the draughtsman in his ability to capture such magnificence on paper.” The monograph earned Haeckel a professorship at the University of Jena, a post from which he would champion Darwinism through lectures and his bestselling 1868 book, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation).