334 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



his countrymen in his views on this question. It is true that he was 

 not entirely free from the influence of the old method of reasoning, as 

 is shown by the fact that he tried to explain the burning of phosphorus 

 in nitrogen — which of course occurred only because he did not in that 

 day have instruments which made it possible to exhaust all the oxygen 

 — by the assumption of a new and mysterious substance which was in 

 itself the essence of light and heat. 



He and Goethe worked together at the extraction of sugar from 

 beets and at other enterprises, and Goethe was his regular and faithful 

 student as well as his colleague and his patron. The great poet be- 

 came an enthusiastic champion of the new chemistry, and published in 

 Schiller's " Musenalmanach " in 1797, an epigram which ran: 



Schon ein Irrlicht sah ich verschwinden, dich Phlogiston! Balde, 

 O Newtonisch Gespenst, folgst du dern Briiderchen nach. 



(Will o' the Wisp, Phlogiston, I see thou hast vanished. And shortly 

 Newton's vague specter shall flee; flee as his brother has fled.) 



But even Goethe's eloquent fulminations were not powerful enough 

 to banish the Newtonian specter. 



After Gottling's death Goethe continued to interest himself in the 

 chemist's widow and little son. The latter, Karl Wilhelm Gottling, be- 

 came librarian and professor of philology at Jena, and was later to 

 repay in some measure his old patron's kindness to himself and his 

 father, by assisting in preparing the complete edition of his works. 



Dr. Alexander Nikolaus von Scherer, born in Russia in 1771, was 

 recommended to Goethe in 1797 by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The poet 

 furnished the newcomer a laboratory and equipment, and both he and 

 Duke Karl August took the warmest interest in him. He made some 

 interesting discoveries with phosphorus, and from 1798 he edited in 

 Jena the Allgemeine Journal der Chemie. He died in Eussia in 1824, 

 a member of the St. Petersburg Academy. 



One of Scherer's assistants in the conduct of the Journal was the 

 somewhat younger Johann Wilhelm Ritter, a Silesian, who came to Jena 

 penniless in 1795. He entered the university, and at once attracted 

 general attention by his scientific aptitude. Ritter made some discover- 

 ies of great value. He discovered the chemically active dark rays in the 

 solar spectrum, and accomplished some interesting results with galvan- 

 ism. He obtained hydrogen and oxygen by disorganizing water with 

 the electric current, he decomposed sulphate of copper, and he con- 

 structed a " charging pile " which was a precursor of the modern ac- 

 cumulator. Goethe studied and worked with him a great deal, espe- 

 cially during the years 1800 and 1801. He was inclined to be some- 

 what speculative and mystical, and especially after his call to the Uni- 

 versity of Munich in 1804, he gave himself up to various lines of fan- 

 tastic theorizing. He became deeply interested in animal magnetism, 



