A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



This same John the Magnanimous it was who found- 

 ed the institution which gives Jena its fame and dis- 

 tinguishes it from all the other quaint hypnotic clus- 

 ters of houses that nestle similarly here and there in 

 other picturesque valleys of the Fatherland I mean, 

 of course, its world-renowned university. It is but a 

 few minutes' walk from the market-place, past the 

 home where Schiller once lived and through the 

 "street" scarcely more than arms'-breadth wide be- 

 yond, to the site of the older buildings of the university. 

 Inornate, prosaic buildings they are, unrelieved even 

 by the dominant note of picturesqueness ; rescued, 

 however, from all suggestion of the commonplace by 

 the rugged ruins of the famed " powder- tower " jutting 

 out from the crest of the hill just above, by the spire 

 of the old church which seems to rise from the oldest 

 university building itself, and by the mountain peaks 

 that jut up into view far beyond. 



If you would enter one of the old buildings there is 

 naught to hinder. Go into one of the lecture-halls 

 which chances at the moment to be unoccupied, and 

 you will see an array of crude old benches for seats 

 that look as if they might have been placed there at 

 the very inaugural of the institution. The boards that 

 serve for desks, if you scan them closer, you will find 

 scarred all over with the marks of knives, showing how 

 some hundreds of successive classes of listeners have 

 whiled away the weary lecture-hours. Not a square 

 inch can you find of the entire desk surface that is un- 

 scarred. If one would woo a new sensation, he has 

 but to seat himself on one of these puritanical old 

 benches and conjure up in imagination the long series 



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