I40 GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE 



matter which can be touched and weighed. The fact that 

 heat is not matter of this kind was proved a Httle later by 

 Count Rumford. 



Wilhelm Scheele was born in Stralsund, being the seventh 

 child of a merchant; in accordance with his wish he became 

 an apothecary, and lived as such in different localities in 

 Sweden, finally in Kopingen on the Malasee, where he died 

 in his forty-fourth year. At the age of fifteen years, as 

 apprentice to an apothecary, he already began in his leisure 

 hours - and when they were not enough, at night - special 

 studies in all the available writings concerning assaying, and 

 also experiments on his own account in the laboratory of the 

 apothecary. He continued this activity during his whole 

 life; it was his greatest joy and chief care: 'to explain new 

 phenomena, that is my care, and how glad is an investigator 

 when he finds what he has sought so industriously; it is a 

 pleasure that fills his heart with joy. For it is only the truth 

 that we wish to know, and what joy it is to have discovered 

 it,' he says himself in letters. Though his means always 

 remained very modest - it was only in the latter years of his 

 life that he became the owner of an apothecary's shop, and 

 he rejected salaried posts which would have tied him - he 

 replaced the want of them by persistent skill, and a rare eye 

 for the essential. A fortunate element in his development 

 was the fact that his mind had been protected from a long 

 period of compulsory education at school, and that he had 

 been spared professional examinations.^ 



He was thus able to absorb freshly and freely what suited 

 him, without having used up his mind previously on unsuit- 

 able material. He read books through once or twice, never 

 needing to look at them again; he had obtained what he 

 wanted. The enormous number of experiments which he 



^ When he was already Icnown as a learned chemist and trustworthy 

 man, and took over his own business, the legal examination was turned 

 into a small festivity. On this point see: Nordenskjold, Scheele's Letters 

 and Laboratory Notes, with a biography, Stockholm, 1892. 



