An early promoter and populariser of Darwin's evolutionary theory, the German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel was a hugely influential figure of the late 19th century. Bernd Brunner looks at how a trip to Sri Lanka sowed the seeds for not only Haeckel's majestic illustrations from his Art Forms in Nature, for which he is perhaps best known today, but also his disturbing ideas on race and eugenics. Ernst Haeckel and his sixteen steamer trunks arrived at the harbor of Colombo “in the glorious light of a cloudless tropical morning” on November 21, 1881, after a four-week journey via Trieste,