SKETCH OF OSCAR SCHMIDT. 693 



SKETCH OF OSCAE SCmilDT. 



OSCAR SCHMIDT was characterized bv Ludwig von Graff, 

 his successor at Griitz, as a real naturalist who, keeping up 

 with the advances of science and philosophy all his life, as a zoolo- 

 gist spanned the whole domain of that science, giving equal interest 

 to every part and branch of it. The animal as a whole, as a living 

 being in the series of organisms, was the object of his concern, and 

 all the parts of the animal and all the processes that go on within 

 it were alike interesting and important to him; and the ultimate 

 purpose of his study of that object was to gain from the facts dis- 

 closed a philosophic view of Nature. 



Eduakd Oscar Schmidt was born at Torgau, Prussia, February 

 24, 1823, the son of a military chaplain who was descended from 

 an old family of clergymen — " a man of fine Saxon culture, with 

 no very great taste for theology, and open-minded to a ripe old 

 age," and who died in 1875. His mother was of French and Ger- 

 man (Hamburg) descent, and counted the great Aristotelian Petrus 

 Ramus among her ancestors. The father w^as a gentle instructor 

 to the son; and 'the latter, attending in the intervals of study to 

 duties of the household and the farm and making good use of his 

 opportunities for relaxation, enjoyed a young life that was invigo- 

 rating to mind and body. He thus acquired tastes that led him 

 frequently in his later life to leave the city and his study and go 

 into the country to build and plant, whereby he endeared himself 

 to the Badenese farmers. On rainy days and winter evenings, as 

 he gleefully told of himself in 1858, the boy of eleven or twelve 

 years of age entertained himself and had his fancy stimulated by 

 reading Campe's old accounts of his travels. He thus became in- 

 terested in geography, and acquired a thirst for travel that was 

 never quenched. 



Having finished his elementary schooling at Weissenfels, on the 

 Saale, where his grandfather had served as superintendent, he went 

 in 1836 to the celebrated Royal School at Pforta, of which his 

 father was an alumnus, and whither he himself took his son thirty 

 years later. He was much impressed by the teaching of Kober- 

 stein, the historian of literature, who unlocked for him the world 

 of Goethe and of romance; and he went out from Pforta into life 

 with a full conviction that the soundness of our culture depends 

 upon its humanistic foundation. He went to Halle in the fall of 

 1842 to fulfill his military obligations and study mathematics and 

 natural science, and became interested in other branches. At the 

 Berlin Hochschule, whither he went next, he further broadened 



