PROFESSOR AT KONIGSBERG 129 



of the domestic and social life of those days as com- 

 pared with that at the close of Helmholtz's life, it makes 

 me sad to think of the indescribable modesty of those earlier 

 wants and pretensions, although my chief feeling is that 

 never did he appear more truly great than at this time, when 

 his marvellous genius was developing and growing, along 

 with his sincere and noble nature. The man who ranked 

 among the elite of the intellectual heroes of Europe, and was 

 feted by kings and princes, never seemed to me worthier of 

 regard than the modest, indefatigable young investigator, 

 who used to construct his bits of apparatus for optical ex- 

 periments from his wife's reels, and his children's bricks, 

 with ends of wax tapers and scraps of string/ This homely 

 apparatus for his intricate and delicate experiments was, how- 

 ever, by no means a drawback in the eyes of Helmholtz. 

 He was wont to say at a later time, when he had magnificent 

 Institutes under his control, ' I was in the habit (and found 

 the habit a very useful one) when I wanted to invent some 

 totally new method, of making myself models of the required 

 instruments, which although they were very fragile, and put 

 together as a stop-gap out of the poorest materials, served 

 me at least in so far that I could detect the first signs of 

 the results expected, and learned the most important of the 

 obstacles on which I might founder. This taught me by 

 experience the difficulties which hamper the mechanician in 

 such new experiments. And it was only when I had made my 

 own theoretical conjectures and provisional experiments, that 

 I took counsel with the mechanician who was to work out my 

 models in brass and steel. And then the difficulties began/ 



He often said in jest to his wife, ' Lend me your eyes for 

 half an hour, and you'll be worth something in my optical 

 experiments/ His wife was indeed all that he had hoped 

 for and counted on, his faithful helpmeet and his true comrade. 

 She worked and wrote for him ; he read the lectures he was 

 going to publish aloud to her before delivering them, that she 

 might judge by her estimate how they would appeal to an 

 educated audience. 



But in the meanwhile her health, which had long been a 

 cause of anxiety, was steadily growing worse, and the last visit 

 to the sea, usually so productive of good, had failed in its 



