Some Time Ago,

We made a post about a book,

 which was illustrated with pictures from nature tiled Art Forms in Nature, the good news is that We have now found a book that is available to download about the naturalist/adventurer that wrote it, Ernst Haeckel, pictured above,

 on November 21, 1881, after a four-week journey via Trieste, Suez, Aden, and Bombay, the zoologist arrived at the harbour of Colombo “in the glorious light of a cloudless tropical morning”, above is a Chromolithograph by W. Koehler, after Ernst Haeckel’s 1882 painting “World’s End”, printed in Haeckel’s Wanderbilder (1905),

and a illustration from his Art Forms in Nature, Haeckel planned to trade “the restraint of our artificial social life” for an existence “in the midst of the simple children of nature . . . forming some conception of that visionary primeval paradise into which the human race was born.” after all, he believed that humanity had originated near Ceylon on the hypothetical continent of “Lemuria” in the Indian Ocean, this conviction certainly influenced his decision to travel to Ceylon — along with the fact that his role models, Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin, never made it to that corner of the world,

in one passage He describes how he discovered thick brushland where the trees “have grown up without any kind of order, and in such wild confusion — so tangled with creepers and climbers, with parasitic ferns, orchids and other hangers-on, every gap closed with a compact network of bush and brake — that it is quite impossible to unravel the knot and distinguish the closely matted stems.” according to Haeckel, simply taking a few steps into this tangled growth was a dangerous undertaking, He recalled being attacked by mosquitoes, bitten by ants, and plagued by all the nettles and thorns deployed by the plants to “bar the way into their mysterious labyrinth” all in all a thoroughly enjoyable read and here is the good news about the book, A Visit To Ceylon, it is free to download as a PDF or as a Kindle amongst others, but be warned He does have some definitely un-PC views, but then how wrong are we to judge 20th century culture by 21st century morals?