Olaf Breidbach

“Muller's passion for marine biology suffered a severe blow when a trip to the coast of Norway in the company of his students W. Schmidt and A. Schneider ended in tragedy. The boat carrying them back from Christiansand was shipwrecked. Muller and Schneider were able to swim to safety, but Schmidt drowned. As Haeckel wrote, "the long and awful struggle in the waves during that black night made an indelible impression on Muller. Since then, a deep and insuperable horror has taken the place of his particular fondness for the sea. He has never again been able to entrust himself to that deceptive element, either aboard a slight barque or a solid steamship. Muller's subsequent work on the radiolarians was thus rather limited.”
― Olaf Breidbach, Art Forms from the Ocean: The Radiolarian Prints of Ernst Haeckel