8 FOUNDATION AND OBJECTS 



History at Jena in 1807, and later (1827) Professor 

 of Physiology at Munich. In 1817 he started a 

 monthly journal of literature and science, the I sis, 

 into which he introduced a political bias which cost 

 him his chair at Jena, and no doubt fomented the 

 suspicion with which (in accordance with their bent) 

 various Government authorities viewed the earlier 

 meetings of the new association. For it was in the 

 Isis that Oken first promulgated ' the plan of a 

 great yearly meeting of the cultivators of natural 

 science and medicine, from all parts of the German 

 fatherland/ He was evidently not easily frightened 

 by the discountenance of government authority. 

 Johnston thus describes him : ' Oken is a little 

 man ... of dark, yet sanguine complexion, and 

 features whose habitual, if not natural, expression 

 is severity and determination. His dark eye and 

 compressed lips have a forbidding and distance- 

 keeping expression, for one can read upon them our 

 own national motto, " Nemo me impune lacessit." 

 Other scientific workers, it may be surmised, were 

 more timid than he : at any rate the first meeting 

 of the Deutscher Naturforscher Versammlung, 

 which took place at Leipzig in 1822, attracted a 

 company of little more than thirty persons. But 

 the seed germinated, and the plant flourished at 

 successive annual meetings in Halle, Wiirzburg, 

 Frankfort, and Dresden, while at Munich in 1827 

 royal patronage helped to dissipate the remains of 

 political suspicion. The society now began to take 

 the shape familiar in the development of the 

 British Association : the members * began to reckon 

 their numbers by hundreds ; and the amount and 

 variety of subjects brought forward at their public 



