668 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF CHRISTIAN GOTTFRIED EHRENBERG. 



By FEEDEEICK HOFFMANN. 



AMONG the pioneers and master minds in the domain of natural 

 science, during the first half of the nineteenth century, several 

 have risen far above their contemporary co-laborers, and have attained 

 to heroic prominence ; while a few, transcending the limits of their 

 own period, have largely contributed to giving shape and character 

 to their time, opened and entered upon novel jDaths or new fields of 

 inquiry, and thereby have immortalized their life-work, and their nam.e 

 in history's imperishable record. Among these sovereigns of science 

 ranks Christian Gottpkied Ehrenberg, whose labors and researches 

 for more than sixty years have connected his name with the most 

 illustrious scientific discoveries of modern times. 



Ehrenberg was the son of a Lutheran minister, and was born April 

 19, 1795, at Delitsch, in Prussia. Having received a classical education 

 at home, and at the famous Schulpforte Gymnasium, he entered the 

 University of Leipsic in 1815 as a student of theology. During the 

 three years' course of theology, he also occupied himself with the study 

 of natural sciences, and, through his increasing interest in the wonders 

 of the creation, took up the study of medicine in 1818 at the University 

 of Berlin, then as now the greatest and foremost of German universi- 

 ties. His efforts and researches were soon directed toward the investi- 

 gation of the minute organisms and the ultimate forms and phenomena 

 of organic life. Since the time of that first remarkable triumvirate, 

 Malpighi, Grew, and Leeuwenhoek, who toward the close of the seven- 

 teenth and in the opening of the eighteenth century had laid the scien- 

 tific foundations of the microscopical method of investigation, hardly 

 any substantial addition, beyond those awakening mere curiosity, had 

 been made to the observations of those eminent investigators. At the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutrochet, Mirbel, Saussure, and 

 Knight had inaugurated a more searching investigation into anatomy 

 and physiology. Link, Treviranus, and Rudolphi followed with still 

 more elaborate and comprehensive researches, and paved the way to 

 the discoveries early attained and rapidly accumulated by Ehrenberg's 

 genius and industry. His master mind discerned the disconnected facts 

 and details of his material in the light of uniformity and generalization. 

 In lieu of the then prevailing belief in generatio equivoca, one of the 

 first achievements of Ehrenberg was an account of a long series of in- 

 vestigations, at once strikingly acute, thorough, and convincing, of a 

 large number of fungi, demonstrating that they, no less than the higher 

 vegetable organisms, originated from seeds. He soon explored the 

 cryptogamic flora of the environs of Berlin, and published a series of 



