JULIUS SACHS. 151 



He had been chiefly occupied during these last years with 

 a work which, under the title of Principien Vegetabilischer 

 Gestaltung {Principles of Vegetable Form), was to set forth 

 his views upon causal morphology. " I should feel it 

 an immense grief if I were prevented from writing this 

 book," he says : " it would embody the thought of forty 

 years, and it is always important that one's ideas should be 

 long and thoroughly brooded over. To finish it would 

 render the last years of my truly miserable existence in 

 some degree bearable." l 



We shall refer again to the purposes of this book, and 

 turn now to a short account of Sachs' career. 



He was essentially a " self-made man," who found it by 

 no means a light matter to attain the eminence which led 

 the most distinguished German universities each to desire to 

 win him for itself. The story of his early years as it appears 

 in these pages is taken from an autobiography intended for 

 his own family, Fraulein M. Sachs having kindly made 

 extracts from it for my use. It will be of great interest to 

 many who only knew him as a mature man occupying an 

 honourable position to learn how literally true were the 

 words " tota die currens ". 



Sachs was born on 2nd October, 1832, at Breslau, 

 where his father was an engraver. For a time his parents 

 lived in the country, and this may have contributed to the 

 early awakening of his mind to the beauty of nature at which 

 he always looked as much with the eye of an artist as with 

 that of an observer. The design that he cherished at one 

 time of writing a work on the beauties of the plant-world was 

 unfortunately never realised/ It would have been of the 

 greatest interest if he, an adept in the art of word-painting, 

 an enemy to all affectations and mannerisms, had given us 

 his thoughts upon this theme. 



His first experiences of school life were not pleasant. 

 Learning by heart, that purely mechanical acquisition of 

 knowledge, was a burden to him as it has been to many 



another highly gifted scholar. Of much greater importance 



1 The quotations are principally taken from letters. 



