CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE 



not fit him for following in his father's footsteps. 

 He had difficulty in acquiring languages, finding it 

 hard to remember words, idiomatic expressions, and 

 irregular grammatical forms. To have to commit 

 prose to memory was torture, but he found it easy 

 to store up passages of poetry, when he was helped 

 by rhythm and rhyme. His father observed this 

 peculiarity, and being himself an enthusiastic student 

 of poetical literature, he introduced his boy to this 

 golden storehouse, and not only read widely with 

 him, but encouraged him to commit to memory poems 

 and ballads from German literature. They read 

 Homer together, and it is a remarkable indication of 

 the breadth of his early education, that he was able to 

 read the fables of L^kman in the original Arabic when 

 he was twelve years of age. His father also exercised 

 him in the composition of essays and even of verses, 

 and Helmholtz remarks that although the verses 

 showed that he was a poor poet, the practice was 

 invaluable in the way of training him to the proper use 

 of forms of expression. No doubt the home, if not 

 scientific, was intellectual. He mentions that he fre- 

 quently listened to philosophical discussions between 

 his father and his friends, and thus he early became 

 acquainted with some of the problems of metaphysics, 

 as enunciated by Kant and Fichte. 



The mind of Helmholtz opened up, becoming more 

 receptive and retentive when the world of nature was 

 placed before him, and when he was introduced to 

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