696 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



treatises. A lively social disposition bound him to numerous col- 

 leagues, and on the whole he felt so much at home in Gratz, espe- 

 cially after he had a new institute and a share in the direction of 

 a zoological station at Trieste in prospect, that he had no thought 

 of a change. He declined invitations to Marburg and Dorpat. 

 He was always favored by the Government, and kept the marks 

 of its consideration faithfully in memory." 



Ludwig von Graff describes three plainly marked periods in 

 Schmidt's scientific career. The first, the beginning of which coin- 

 cided with his entrance into his scientific professorship, was char- 

 acterized by his labors on the Turbellaria, from which he was only 

 occasionally diverted during his residence at Jena and Cracow. 

 " The observations on infusoria, radiates, and tapeworms, the struc- 

 ture of the annelids and the development of the mollusks, the de- 

 scriptions of new amphibia, and the important discovery of the 

 crustacean nature of the peltogasters, were, we might say, only rests 

 in the uninterrupted course of the Turbellaria studies; and that 

 Schmidt was constantly returning to them was not merely because 

 particular interest had been devoted to them in Germany at that 

 time only by M. Schultze and E. Leuckart, for other animal groups 

 had fared no better among the then small number of scientifically 

 working zoologists, but Schmidt had won his earliest scientific fame 

 with his little book on the fresh-water Rhabdoccelas (1848), and had 

 by means of it entered the circle of recognized investigators. He 

 gave in this book the first connected presentation of the whole or- 

 ganization of a group of animals, the diversity and great abundance 

 of which in fresh water were hardly suspected, and the anatomy of 

 which consisted of few and imperfectly understood isolated data; 

 described new systems of organs in them, and based an improved 

 classification on their remarkably complicated and variously graded 

 structure, with new families, genera, and species. The little book 

 was therefore received with much interest. A journey to the Faroe 

 Islands in 1848, and his first excursion to Lesina in 1852, followed 

 in 1856 by a journey from Cracow to Mce and Naples, enabled him 

 to increase the number of new species, and permitted an insight into 

 the great diversity of forms, without, however, giving him time for 

 accurate anatomical investigations, for the nature of the objects 

 promised a considerable advance in this direction only at the cost 

 of tenacious patience and untiring industry. His subsequent labors 

 on the Rhabdocoelas of the vicinity of Cracow, the Dendrocoslas of 

 the vicinity of Gratz, and his researches on the Turbellaria of Corfu 

 and Cephalonia, which (in 1861) closed this period of his career as 

 worthily as it had begun, proved that Schmidt possessed both these 

 requirements. These labors, if he had accomplished no more, 



