BOYHOOD 7 



and gave satisfaction to his masters. His handwriting indeed 

 was criticized, and his mathematical home-tasks were in- 

 adequately performed : but his power of working by himself, 

 and the attention, zeal, and thought which he bestowed upon 

 his studies, were highly commended. At the outset, in the 

 lower classes, he was hampered by the want of a good memory 

 for disconnected facts : l this showed itself/ he says fifty years 

 later, 'in the difficulty which I still distinctly remember of 

 distinguishing between right and left ; later on, when I got 

 to languages in my school-work, it was harder for me to 

 learn the vocabularies, grammatical irregularities, and idio- 

 matical expressions, than for the others. History, in particular, 

 as it was taught in those days, was quite beyond me. It was 

 a real torture to learn prose extracts by heart. This defect 

 has of course increased, and is a nuisance in my old age. 

 I found no difficulty in learning the poems of the great masters, 

 but the more laboured verses of second-rate poets were far 

 less easy/ 



The father's influence was the most important factor in the 

 boy's intellectual development. At home he occupied himself 

 in arousing his children (with whom he was always on cordial, 

 if not affectionate, terms) to a ^sense of the ideal in poetry, art, 

 and music, while at the same time he strove to make them 

 good patriots. As a keen teacher of Greek, he read Homer 

 with his pupils, and as their instructor in German he gave 

 them great facility of expression by means of prose essays 

 and metrical exercises. 



The first three years of school-life were thus devoted mainly 

 to grammatical studies, and to the aesthetic side of young 

 Helmholtz's education, but with his entry into the second 

 class the curriculum was widened to include mathematics and 

 physics. The teaching of Prof. C. Meyer, Helmholtz's first 

 mathematical tutor, is still praised by his surviving students. 

 His treatise on ' The Caustic Curves produced by the Reflection 

 of Light from Curves of the Second Order', which was pub- 

 lished in the School Report for 1838, proves that Meyer 

 combined scientific with pedagogic interests, and it may have 

 been thanks to him that young Helmholtz, while his class 

 were reading Cicero or Virgil, which did not interest him, 

 would often be engaged beneath the table in working out the 



