Lehrjahrc and Wiinderjalire 131 



GIBSSEN, July 30, 1840. 

 MY DEAH FATHKH, 



Being thoroughly enuuied at Giesseu and having nothing to do from morning 

 to night 1 , I have determined to make a bolt down the Danube and to see Constantinople 

 and Athens. I have made all the calculations of time and cost and they are very 

 favourable. Can I take any message to the Skeys 1 I do not wait for an answer before 

 I start for two reasons, I 8t that I have not time and 2" dljr as you promised me a good 

 summer's tour to Sweden and Norway, of course you can have no objection to a com- 

 paratively civilised trip. I am getting on in German capitally, and shall learn almost 

 as much of it in these my travels as if I had settled in the midst of Berlin much 

 more than by staying in Giessen. Another reason for my unhesitating bolt is that as 

 I shall have very little time after I am settled at Cambridge, I had better make the 

 most of the present opportunity. So I will fancy that I have received a favourable 

 answer, and so thank you very much indeed for your consent. My conscience being 

 thus pacified, I will tell you something of Giessen. It is a scrubby, abominably paved 

 little town cram full of students, noisy, smoky and dirty. Of these students, by far 

 the best are the Chemicals, they being all firstrate men, wot write books and so forth ; 

 they are one shade less dirty than the others, that is to say they are of the colour of umber, 

 the others being Bt Sienna. They have a table d'hote to themselves at 6 o'clock (at 

 which I join) and they drink much sour wine and Seltzer water. Every now and then 

 they dissipate, i.e. send for a quart bottle extra of Rauenthaler, and drink healths and 

 sing songs. To drink healths you clink your glass with everybody else's glass at table, 

 thereby spilling much wine on the table-cloth and over your neighbours' necks over 

 which you are stretching. As there were 30 sitting down together at the one which I 

 witnessed, by the simple rule of combinations 2 , n(n- 1), or 30 x 29, the glasses must 

 have clinked 870 times for each health that was drunk say (at a low computation 20 

 were drunk) then 17,400 clinks must have ensued!! If one student calls out to 

 another : " Sie sind Doctor," it is a challenge to drink 2 glasses of wine with him ; if 

 " Sie sind Professor," then 4 and so on. They have also a very uncomfortable custom 

 for foreigners which is this one man walks up to another (whom he knows) and asks 

 him if he has any objection to drink " Schmollens " with him ; the consequence of 

 which ceremony is the calling each other " du " ever after instead of " sie," and in fact 

 making them perpetual chums. The way in which it is performed is by drinking a glass 

 of wine, the arm which holds the glass being put through the corresponding 'arm of the 

 other and then saluting each other on both cheeks ; this last part to be continually 

 repeated after any absence ! I have not seen it performed, but I was in great fear and 

 trepidation, even more so than when before Mary Luard at a Christmas party. The 



1 Our hero forgets that in his last letter to his father he had arranged to work 

 hard at German for a fortnight ! I do not think that Francis Galton ever obtained 

 more than a working knowledge of German, i.e. that he spoke it fluently or read its 

 literature from inclination. < 



2 Francis's mathematics seem to have failed him, or the Giessen custom differed 

 from that of Heidelberg forty years later ; each pair clink only once, not twice. 

 Perhaps he counted a clink to each glass ! 



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