CHAPTER ELEVEN 



HEIDELBERG— THE PLOCKSTRASSE 



ON arrival in Heidelberg, we put up in a hotel and spent three days 

 hunting for quarters. Finally, we took a six months' lease of a 

 furnished flat at 93 Plockstrasse, consisting of two bedrooms, a kitchen, 

 and a living room — no bathroom, of course. Indeed, I never saw a bath- 

 room in a private dwelling, whether house or apartment, in Germany. I 

 asked a German acquaintance where I could get a bathtub. In great 

 surprise, he said: "A bathtub! What do you want of a bathtub?" I 

 replied : "I have the absurd habit of getting into it every morning." To 

 this his annihilating answer was: "I never heard of anything like that. 

 In summer we go to the river, but no one bathes here in winter." 



Our landlord Hved on the floor above us and his maid-of-all-work did 

 the cleaning for us. My dear Mother had for years longed to have her 

 own house once more and this little foretaste of independent house- 

 keeping was a real pleasure to her, which had the advantage of afford- 

 ing her an unexacting occupation, which, with her zealous studies of 

 the German language, kept her pleasantly occupied. She prepared a 

 light breakfast and supper; our more substantial midday meal was sent 

 down from our landlord's kitchen. And, oh! what stuflf it was! That we 

 lived through six months of it, without acquiring chronic dyspepsia, 

 was part of the wonderful good luck that seemed to attend all our 

 European undertakings. We took a walk every day, when the weather 

 permitted, but I suffered from an insufficiency of exercise. 



I waited upon Professor Gegenbaur and presented Huxley's letter of 

 introduction and, the next morning, met him at the laboratory, where 

 he showed me an immense collection of microscopic preparations, illus- 

 trating the embryology of the Lamprey Eel {Petromyzon), a creature 

 which is far more primitive and lower in the scale than any fish. One 

 of Gegenbaur 's assistants, Dr. Calberla, had spent four years in col- 

 lecting the eggs and cutting and mounting the serial sections, and had 

 then died before he could do more than publish a couple of brief, pre- 



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