May 13, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



663 



years of my truly miserable existence in 

 some degree bearable." * 



Sacbs was essentially a ' self-made man,' 

 •who found it by no means a light matter to 

 attain the eminence which led the most dis- 

 tinguished German universities each to 

 desire to win him for itself. The story of 

 his early years, as it appears in these pages, 

 is taken from an autobiography intended 

 for his own family, Fraulein M. Sachs hav- 

 ing kindly made extracts from it for my use. 

 It will be of great interest to many who 

 only knew him as a mature man occupying 

 an honorable position to learn bow literally 

 true were the words ' tota die currens.' 



Sachs was born on the 2d October, 1832, at 

 Breslau, where his father was an engraver. 

 For a time his parents lived in the country, 

 and this may have contributed to the early 

 awakening of his mind to the beauty of na- 

 ture, at which he always looked as much 

 with the eye of an artist as with that of an 

 observer. The design that he cherished at 

 one time of writing a work on the beauties 

 of the plant-world was unfortunately never 

 realized. It would have been of the great- 

 est interest if he, an adept in the art of 

 word-painting, an enemy to all affectations 

 and mannerisms, had given us his thoughts 

 upon this theme. 



His first experiences of school life were 

 not pleasant. Learning by heart, that 

 purely mechanical acquisition of knowl- 

 edge, was a burden to him, as it has been to 

 many another highly gifted scholar. Of 

 much greater importance than his school 

 instruction was his father's training in 

 drawing. From his thirteenth to his six- 

 teenth year he drew and painted flowers, 

 fungi and other natural objects, and his 

 artistic talents played, as we shall see later, 

 an important rule in his career. 



His family possessed but few books, and 

 the boy felt stirring within him a longing, 

 doubtless inexplicable to himself, for in- 



* The quotations are principally taken from letters. 



tellectual advantages. And thus his broth- 

 er's acquaintance with the sons of the 

 physiologist Purkinje,* at that time a pro- 

 fessor at Breslau, was of great importance 

 to him. His brother brought home the 

 Penny Magazine from these playfellows, and 

 the prehistoric animals depicted in it 

 aroused so great an interest in Julius, then 

 as always thirsting for knowledge, that al- 

 though he could not understand the Eng- 

 lish text the ' extinct monsters ' appeared to 

 him most realistically in his dreams ! Later 

 he himself came to know Purkinje's sons, 

 and this acquaintance shed a ray of light 

 upon his life ; for the first time he saw a 

 refined home, free from all petty cares 

 as to daily bread, filled by stirring intel- 

 lectual life, and dominated in every de- 

 tail by the imposing figure of the white- 

 haired professor who inspired Sachs with 

 the greatest respect. Julius learned from 

 his sisters to press plants and heard that 

 there were such things as botanical collec- 

 tions ; he proceeded to start one for himself. 

 His father, who knew the popular names 

 of many plants, encouraged these endeav- 

 ors. They made expeditions in the early 

 morning hours, and at fourteen years old 

 Sachs could already determine his plants 

 according to Scholtz's ' Flora.' But his her- 

 barium was stolen, and this was his first 

 bitter, deeply felt grief. He related his 

 loss to every one and could not understand 

 that other people failed to recognize its 

 gravity. He never again collected plants 

 until in later years, as professor, he started 

 an herbarium for the purposes of demon- 

 stration. The way in which at the pres- 

 ent day so many botanists entirely neglect 

 the practical knowledge of plants was 



*J. E. Purkinje (1787-1869) was professor of 

 physiology and pathology in Breslau from 1823 till 

 1850, and afterwards in Prague. He was the author 

 also of a botanical treatise {De ceUulis antherarum 

 fibrosis nee non granorum jioUinarium formis commen- 

 taiio phylotomica, Breslau, 1830). 



