198 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



A year of work and of the richest scientific discoveries lay 

 behind him of sad memories also. At the Christmas season 

 of 1859, the beloved wife lay dying, who had watched him 

 grow up from the modest assistant-physician at Potsdam into 

 the most famous physicist and physiologist of the day, and who 

 had beautified his home and life with the most self-sacrificing 

 love and discerning judgement. And now the Christmas of 

 1860 found him weary in body, overtasked in mind, desolate 

 in his affections. Notwithstanding the love and devotion of 

 his mother-in-law, he felt that the education of his two little 

 children could never be all that he and his wife had planned, 

 and further, that his deep interest in science and art, and 

 the love of aesthetics which had never been eclipsed by his 

 profoundest abstractions, were in danger of atrophy, whereby 

 he would lose the marvellous fertility and productivity that 

 elevated him above all the other scientific men of his day. 



On February 13, 1861, he writes to Lord Kelvin : 



'On this account I had seriously to think of introducing 

 a new order of things, and if this had to be done, it was better 

 on all accounts that it should come soon. At the end it did 

 come about more rapidly than I had expected, for when love 

 has once obtained permission to germinate, it grows without 

 further appeal to reason. My fiancee is a gifted maiden, young 

 in comparison with myself, and is I think one of the beauties 

 of Heidelberg. She is very keen-witted and intelligent, accus- 

 tomed to society, as she received a good deal of her education 

 in Paris and London, in the charge of an English lady, the 

 wife of her uncle Dr. Mohl, Professor of Persian at the College 

 de France, in Paris. She therefore speaks French fluently, 

 and is decidedly better than I in English. For the rest her 

 "fashionable" (sic) education has in no way interfered with 

 her straightforward, simple nature/ 



Du Bois writes to inquire further details, since all that 

 concerned Helmholtz had a lively interest for him. 



1 My bride-elect/ replies Helmholtz on March 2, 1861, ' is 

 the daughter of Robert v. Mohl; she appealed to me from 

 the outset of my life here as a most intelligent young lady, 

 but I saw very little of her. She was away for a long time 

 in Paris, staying with her uncle Julius v. Mohl, Professor of 

 Persian at the College de France. His wife is an English^ 



