AUGUSTUS FENDLER.! 
Arter Dr. Engelmann’s death, the beginning of a notice 
of Mr. Fendler was found upon his table, from which it was 
learned that he had died at Trinidad, some time previous. 
Inquiries sent to the Port of Spain, where he had for several 
years resided, remain unanswered. An autobiographical ac- 
count which he addressed to a correspondent (and which, with 
some of his letters, we hope will before long be printed) en- 
ables us to state that Mr. Fendler was born at Gumbinnen, 
on the easternmost borders of Prussia, January 10, 1813, lost 
his father in infancy, was sent to the gymnasium of the town 
when twelve years old, but was at sixteen apprenticed to the 
town clerk, where, perhaps, he perfected the neat and clear 
handwriting with which his correspondents are familiar. 
Having a fondness for mathematics and chemistry, he ob- 
tained in 1834, upon examination, a nomination to the Royal 
Polytechnic School at Berlin, but relinquished it after a year 
on account of delicate health. In 1836 he came from Bremen 
to Baltimore, “‘ with a couple of dollars in his pocket,’ worked 
in a tan-yard in Philadelphia, then in a lamp factory in New 
York; in 1838 he traveled in the most economical way to _ 
St. Louis, which required thirty days, and was employed by a 
lamp-maker who made “ spirit-gas” for lighting public-houses, 
coal-cas being then unknown so far west. Soon after, he 
made his way to New Orleans and to Texas, where he was 
witness to the ravages of yellow fever in the summer and fall 
of 1839. He returned to Illinois, broken in health and empty 
in purse, taught school for some time; then, the spirit of wan- 
dering and of solitude coming strongly upon him, he took pos- 
session of an uninhabited island in the Missouri River, about 
three hundred miles above St. Louis, where he enjoyed a her- 
mit’s life for six months, and until a great spring rise of the 
1 American Journal of Science and Arts, 3 ser., xxix. 169. (1885.) 
