This merchant showed me an
original photograph of the execution of the Emperor Maximilian, taken on
the spot a moment before the word to fire was given, and a second taken
immediately afterwards. The calm bearing of the Emperor and the two
generals compelled admiration. This was the first time I had seen
photography taken into the service of history.
In the Hamburg Zoological Gardens I was fascinated by the aquarium, with
its multitudes of aquatic animals and fish. There, for the first time in
my life, I saw an elephant, and did not tire of gazing at the mighty
beast. I was struck by the strange caprice with which the great Being we
call Nature goes to work, or, more correctly, by the contrast between
the human point of view and Nature's mode of operations. To us, the
elephant's trunk was burlesque, its walk risibly clumsy; the eagle and
the kite seemed to us, as they sat, to have a severe appearance and a
haughty glance; the apes, picking lice from one another and eating the
vermin, were, to our eyes, contemptible and ridiculous at the same time;
but Nature took everything equally seriously, neither sought nor avoided
beauty, and to her one being was not more central than another. That
must be deemed Nature's central point which is equidistant from the
lowest and from the highest being; it was not impossible, for instance,
that the _harefish_, a great, thick, odd-looking creature, was the
real centre of terrestrial existence, in the same way as our celestial
sphere has its centre, through which a line reaches the pole of the
zodiac in the constellation of the Dragon.
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