260 JUSTUS VON LIEBIG. 
school was very deplorable; I had no ear memory, and retained nothing 
or very little of what is learned through this sense; I found myself in 
the most uncomfortable position in which a boy could possibly be; 
languages and everything that is acquired by their means, that gains 
praise and honor in the school were out of my reach; and when the 
venerable rector of the gynmasium (Zimmermann), on one occasion of 
his examination of my class, came to me and made a most cutting 
remonstrance with me for my want of diligence, how I was the plague 
of my teachers and the sorrow of my parents, and what did I think 
was to become of me, and when I answered him that I would be a 
chemist, the whole school and the good old man himself broke into an 
uncontrollable fit of laughter, for no one at the time had any idea that 
chemistry was a thing that could be studied. 
Since the ordinary career of a gymnasium student was not open to 
me, ny father took me to an apothecary at Heppenheim, in the Hessian 
sergstrasse; but at the end of ten months he was so tired of me that 
he sent me home again to my father. I wished to be a chemist, but 
not a druggist. The ten months sufficed to make me completely 
acquainted alike with the use and the manifold applications of the 
thousand and one different things which are found in a druggist’s 
shop. 
Left to myself in this way, without advice and direction, | completed 
my sixteenth year, and mny persistent importunity at last induced my 
father to give me permission to go to the University of Bonn; whence 
I followed to Erlangen the professor of chemistry, Kastner, who had 
been called to the Bavarian University. There arose at that time at 
the newly-established University of Bonn an extraordinary quickening 
of scientific life; but the degenerate philosophical methods of investi- 
gation, as they had been embodied in Oken, and still worse in Wil- 
brand, had a most pernicious influence on the branches of natural 
science, for it had led alike in lecture and in study to a want of appre- 
ciation of experiment and of unprejudiced observation of nature, which 
was ruinous to many talented young men. 
From the professional chair the pupil received an abundance of 
ingenious contemplations; but, bodiless as they were, nothing could be 
made of them. 
The lectures of Kastner, who was considered a most eminent chem- 
jst, were without order, illogical, and arranged just like the jumble of 
knowledge which I carried about in my head. The relations which he 
discovered between phenomena were somewhat after the following 
pattern: 
‘“The influence of the moon upon the rain is clear, for as soon as the 
moon is visible the thunder-storm ceases,” or “the influence of the 
sun’s rays on water is shown by the rise of the water in the shafts of 
mines, some of which can not be worked in the height of summer.” 
That we see the moon when the thunderstorm is dispelled, and that 
