152 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



than his school instruction was his father's training- in draw- 

 ing. From his thirteenth to his sixteenth year he drew 

 and painted flowers, fungi, and other natural objects, and 

 his artistic talents played, as we shall see later, an important 

 role in his career. 



His family possessed but few books and the boy felt 

 stirring within him a longing, doubtless inexplicable to him- 

 self, for intellectual advantages. And thus his brother's 

 acquaintance with the sons of the physiologist, Purkynje, 1 at 

 that time a professor at Breslau, was of great importance to 

 him. His brother brought home the Penny Magazine from 

 these playfellows, and the prehistoric animals depicted in it 

 aroused so great an interest in Julius, then as always thirst- 

 ing for knowledge, that although he could not understand 

 the English text the "extinct monsters " appeared to him 

 most realistically in his dreams ! Later he himself came to 

 know Purkynje's sons and this acquaintance shed a ray of 

 light upon his life ; for the first time he saw a refined home, 

 free from all petty cares as to daily bread, filled by stirring 

 intellectual life, and dominated in every detail by the im- 

 posing figure of the white-haired professor who inspired 

 Sachs with the greatest respect. Julius learned to press 

 plants from his sisters and heard that there were such things 

 as botanical collections : he proceeded to start one for 

 himself. His father, who knew the popular names of many 

 plants, encouraged these endeavours. They made expedi- 

 tions in the early morning hours, and at fourteen years old 

 Sachs could already determine his plants according to 

 Scholtz's Flora. But his herbarium was stolen, and this 

 was his first bitter, deeply felt grief. He related his loss 

 to every one and could not understand that other people 

 failed to recognise its gravity. He never again collected 

 plants until in later years, as professor, he started an her- 

 barium for the purposes of demonstration. The way in 

 which at the present day so many botanists entirely neglect 



1 J. E. Purkynje (i 787-1869) was Professor of Physiology and Patho- 

 logy in Breslau from 1823 till 1850, and afterwards in Prague. He was 

 the author also of a botanical treatise (De cellulis antherarum fibrosis nee 

 non granorum polli?iarium for mis commentatio phytotomica, Breslau, 1830). 



