128 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



is merely a bread-earning industry, or a matter of independent 

 intellectual interest. The man who only works on as he was 

 taught by his teacher or master in bygone days, and merely 

 cares to earn the means of his subsistence or pleasure, will 

 be crushed by the mechanical side of his work, but any one 

 who works from pleasure in the thing, and tries to help the 

 subject forward, will be ennobled by his work, let it be what 

 it may/ 



Otto Helmholtz accordingly went into metallurgy, and soon 

 became a distinguished engineer, the present Director of the 

 great Rhenish Steel Works at Ruhrort. The brothers were 

 united in the most intimate friendship until the death of the 

 great scientist. 



All the interests of the bereaved father now gravitated to- 

 wards Konigsberg. He was greatly pleased, and encouraged 

 to look to the future without bitterness, and with confidence 

 in his own powers, when his son Hermann (to whom he had 

 sent some copies of the papers formerly published in the 

 Reports of the Potsdam Gymnasium, for distribution among 

 his friends) wrote : ' Lobeck told me the other day that he 

 had been astonished to hear that the philologist Helmholtz 

 was such a near relation of mine. It had not occurred to him 

 to connect us, because our subjects are so very different/ He 

 goes on, ' I wonder what you would have said if I had become 

 a Peer of Prussia ; as our two famous politicians Simson and 

 Schubert declined, they asked me among others if I would not 

 go up for election. Of course I refused decidedly, because 

 that career needs quite a different sort of ambition from any 

 I am prone to/ 



The infirm old father heartily approved of his rejection of 

 the membership of the Upper House, ' because your scientific 

 work in science will be the most profitable to you/ 



Five years of prolific academic work and splendid achieve- 

 ment in the different branches of science thus went by in 

 KGnigsberg; Helmholtz and his wife were happy and settled 

 there. Cheerful and contented, serious and industrious, averse 

 to no social pleasures, they gradually formed an agreeable 

 society of friends, who shared the interests of both wife and 

 husband. 



'When,' writes his sister-in-law, 'I look back at the style 



