SKETCH OF CARL SEMPER. 837 



the child who brings his certificate of conduct or advancement, move 

 in a world of abstractions. The words number, form, distance, 

 situation, are so many mental concepts. Language is a translation 

 of reality, a transposition in which objects figure already generalized 

 and classified by the labor of thought. — Translated for the Popular 

 Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes. 



SKETCH OF CAEL SEMPER 



GAEL SEMPER is characterized by Dr. August Schuberg * as 

 a student who, while being especially thorough in a particular 

 line of research and generally preferring it, was remarkably free 

 from, that kind of specialism which is so common and often detri- 

 mental to science as a whole. " There are few investigators who 

 have made themselves so familiar with the most various groups of 

 the animal kingdom through their own researches as he; and he 

 most catholicly busied himself with all branches of zoology — anat- 

 omy, histology, embryology, physiology and general biology, sys- 

 tematic biology, and geographical distribution — in all of which he 

 pursued his own lines of investigation, so that it may be said that 

 there are few regions of zoology which he did not explore." He 

 was also an industrious student in anthropology and ethnology. 



Gael Gottfried Semper was born at Altona, July 6, 1832, 

 the son of the manufacturer Johann Carl Semper, and died at Wiirz- 

 burg, May 29, 1893. He attended the gymnasium of his native 

 city till he reached the Secunda, and then entered the school for 

 naval cadets which was founded by the " Provisional Government " 

 of Schleswig-Holstein at Kiel in 1848. ISTot finding the conditions 

 here very attractive, he joined the artillery as a volunteer and en- 

 gaged in a brief campaign against the Danes. When Schleswig- 

 Holstein was given up to Denmark, he, by his father's advice, 

 attended the Hanover Polytechnic School from 1851 to 1854. At 

 the University of Wurzburg (1854 to 1858) he gave special atten- 

 tion to comparative morphology and histology. Having received 

 the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Wurzburg in 1856, he con- 

 tinued his studies there and at the Kiel High School in 1857, 

 and in November of that year started on a tour through Ger- 

 many, Erance, and Spain, the object of which, he said, was partly 

 study in the museums and libraries, and partly to find associates who 

 would join him in a more extensive scientific journey. His inten- 



* In Arbeiten aus dem Zoologisch-zootomischen Institut in Wurzburg, in an article 

 whence tbe material for this sketch is derived. 



