THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN GERMANY. 



161 



powerful and best equipped army. But this is only the 

 creation of the present age. With greater pride it may 

 boast of having trained in the course of centuries the 

 largest and most efficient intellectual army, ready at any 

 moment to take up and carry to a successful issue great 

 scientific undertakings demanding the intense thought 

 and labour of a few secluded students, or the combined 

 efforts of a large number of ready workers. This army 

 is scattered through the length and breadth of the land, 

 and even beyond its frontiers in neighbouring countries, 

 wherever universities and high schools are situated.^ It 

 is not a stationary power, but is continually on the move 

 from south to north, from west to east, to and fro, exchang- 

 ing and recruiting its forces, bringing heterogeneous ele- 

 ments into close contact, spreading everywhere the seed 

 of new ideas and discoveries, and preparing new land 

 for still more extended cultivation. 



^ The extent of the German uni- 

 versity system cannot be estimated 

 by the twenty universities marked 

 on the map attached to the trans- 

 lation of Conrad's book, as these 

 represent only the existing univer- 

 sities of the present German empire ; 

 nor yet by the forty-three univer- 

 sities given in the appendix, p. 290, 

 as they contain only some of the 

 Austrian, but none of the Swiss 

 universities ; nor even by taking up 

 Ascherson's valuable ' Deutscher 

 UniversitJits-Kalender,' which con- 

 tains the German-speaking univer- 

 sities thirty-four in number in 

 1887 but of course does not con- 

 tain the names of those which have 

 been suppressed. There are also 

 the universities of Denmark, Nor- 

 way, and Sweden, which have ex- 

 changed many important professors 

 with Germany, and those of Hol- 

 land in older, of Belgium in modern 

 VOL. I. 



times, which have done the same 

 thing. The Russian universities 

 also were largely organised on Ger- 

 man models, though since the re- 

 forms of 1863 they aim at a more 

 national character. Brandis found- 

 ed the University of Athens on 

 German lines in 1837. The Russian 

 University at Kasan , that ' ' ultima 

 musarum Thule," was founded in 

 1804, and Gottingen supplied its 

 first professors. From there and 

 from the hardly less remote Tran- 

 sylvanian town, Maros V^sdrhely, 

 there issued the revolution of our 

 fundamental notions in geometry, 

 and there is reason to believe that 

 both Lobachevsky's and Bolyai's 

 theories are ultimately connected 

 with the speculations of Gauss. 

 See Prof. A. Vasiliev's Address on 

 Lobach^vsky, translated byHalsted, 

 p. 5 sqq. 



