20 THE ALUMNI JOURNAL "*" 



No, but the bust of the intellectual martyr adorns the niches of a 

 thousand museums. 



And that little drug store out in Sweden that couldn't pay its 

 expenses has taken off its sign, but the experiments which the 

 chemist performed in that obscure village will never be removed 

 from the sanctuary of science. 



Places are swallowed up, cities disappear, nations decay and king- 

 doms perish, but an unusual man marches through the aisles of the 

 ages, never to be lost. 



Amoebae may be identical, but the minds of men differ; Keats 

 had the poetic instinct, and Scheele the scientific spirit. 



Keats was apprenticed to an apothecary, but he cared more for 

 poems than pills, and sometimes when he mixed an ointment there 

 came to him a sunbeam with fairies floating in the ray. He was a 

 child of Apollo, not Aesculapius, and the lustrous parent claimed his 

 favorite son. The pestle was not the fingers that held poesy's pen, 

 and he exchanged the gallipots of the counter for the galaxy of the 

 heavens, and instead of the dried remains of collected beetles, he 

 searched for the irridescent butterflies that shake their damask 

 wings among the morning glories. 



Scheele was sent to a school of languages, but he was more in- 

 terested in acids than ablatives, and the miracles that take place in 

 a test-tube had for him an awful fascination. And soon in Bauch's 

 drug store was a new clerk, aged fourteen. Little Karl Scheele had 

 begun to rinse botles, and to wipe the dust from the jars that were 

 seldom used. He removed all dirt from the stem of the funnels, and 

 when he cleaned the metal mortars their polished surfaces reflected 

 back his earnest features. And he told his brothers and sisters all 

 about it, for his parents had ten children besides himself, but what 

 their names were I really do not know. 



Scheele's original work was done mainly at night. It was then he 

 saw what was never seen before. When the moon glorified the fir- 

 mament, and a thousand starry orbs looked out, strange power came 

 to him, and he planted his foot on untrodden ground. In his skillful 

 hands the crucible became a sesame that unlocked the door of na- 

 ture- His spatula was a magic wand that brought forth unknown 

 things. He filled his capsules with the powders of research. His 

 tongs pulled hot coals of fact from the boiling caldron of knowledge. 

 With the bellows of reason he fanned the fires of truth. When his 



