694 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the scope of his culture, pursued philosophical studies, and finally 

 settled upon the organic sciences. His interest was gradually di- 

 verted from mathematics, and he took up zoology with enthusiasm. 

 Johann Miiller whose portrait, his son Erich Schmidt says, in the 

 memorial address from which we draw most of the facts of his life, 

 always adorned his room permitted him, in 1845, after a summer 

 term in comparative anatomy at Heligoland, to take part in a re- 

 search upon sea animals, and impressed a stamp on the young inves- 

 tigator's view of Nature that lasted till the Darwinian revolution. 

 Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg interested him in the investigation 

 of the minute life of the infusoria, and, besides being his teacher, 

 had a fatherly affection for him. 



In 1846 Schmidt obtained a promotion to Doctor of Philosophy 

 at Halle, the subject of his still unprinted dissertation being the 

 sacred Scardbceus. He passed the higher teachers' examination in 

 Berlin, and thereby avoided a year of probation at a realgymna- 

 sium. In August, 1847, he habilitated himself at Jena. He pre- 

 sented, on the occasion, a paper entitled Morphological Fragments, 

 in which, while the name of Oken was mentioned appreciatively 

 in the introduction, the gap between his philosophy and the current 

 zoology was insisted upon. He became Professor Extraordinary 

 of Natural History in this university in 1849, and Director of the 

 Grand Ducal Zoological Museum in 1854. While at Jena he pub- 

 lished the Handbook of Comparative Anatomy (1849), the Hand 

 Atlas of Comparative Anatomy (1852), and a historical study on 

 the Development of Comparative Anatomy (1855). Some results 

 of a journey to the North in the course of his studies of the Tur- 

 bellaria were embodied in a lecture on the Faroe Islands (1848), 

 and Pictures from the North, collected during a Journey to the 

 North Cape (1854), a versatile work, in which his sharp powers of 

 observation were well illustrated. A work of somewhat different 

 character was a lecture on Goethe's Relation to the Organic Natu- 

 ral Sciences, which was delivered in the Berlin Singakademie and 

 was printed in 1853. 



Having occupied the professorship at Jena for seven years on 

 a salary never exceeding one hundred thalers, and after declining 

 an invitation to Prague, Schmidt in 1855 accepted the appoint- 

 ment of Professor of Zoology in the University of Cracow. The 

 conditions at this institution were quite different from those which 

 had surrounded him at Jena. He received more liberal allow- 

 ances than had been granted him there; but political affairs were 

 disturbed, and he withdrew in 185 1 to become Professor of Zoology 

 and Comparative Anatomy, and eventually rector, at Gratz. Here 

 he spent the fifteen most enjoyable and most fruitful years of his 



