62 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIX. No. 1255 



master, the other a fencing master. Under 

 the latter the yoixng man became so mighty 

 with the " palash '' that he wounded to the 

 death a yomig English opponent; whereupon, 

 instead of vaingloriously seeking more vic- 

 tims, he gave up fencing. His foreign pro- 

 fessors included, besides the two " Ordent- 

 liche " above named, two " Ausserordentliche " 

 in the persons of a landlady's daughters, who 

 gave lessons in German, cards and dancing, 

 with well conducted practical exercises. The 

 youthful Eaphael also met von Roemer and 

 was shown his fossils; and he saw something 

 of the Hanover Polytechnic students, of whom 

 the most capacious exceeded four fold and 

 more the untrained young America's modest 

 maximum of twenty Schoppen at a sitting ; but 

 a single season of such carousing was his first 

 and last; its excesses had no attraction for 

 him. Indeed, in this and other lines his edu- 

 cation seems to have been conducted on a 

 strictly experimental basis and to have led to 

 wise conclusions : proficiency was repeatedly 

 reached in one art or another, but if the 

 acquired art proved undesirable it was given 

 up and another was tried. The young man 

 therefore had all manner of adventures, pleas- 

 ant and unpleasant; things were always hap- 

 pening to him. He tramped along the Rhine, 

 collecting rocks and minerals; he rode over 

 the Taunus hills with a fair American com- 

 panion ; he secretly pawned his mother's watch 

 to a Jew at Marburg to get money for railway 

 fares; and he tried his luck on the gambling 

 tables at Wiesbaden. Then after a summer 

 trip in Switzerland, of which little is told, 

 mother and son went to Paris for the winter; 

 ^manifestly his European education was becom- 

 ing cosmopolitan. 



The French capital proved attractive in va- 

 rious directions. Soon after arriving there, 

 research led him to pick up a fine two-inch 

 Brazilian topaz for a couple of francs from a 

 dealer on the quais. The youth always had 

 the luck with him. A little later he declined 

 the cajoleries of a beauteous and tearful ac- 

 tress, and made instead a lasting friend- 

 ship with an octagenarian baroness. Truly 

 in friendship-making he had a magnificent 



and enviable capacity, and always chose from 

 among the best: but the nonchalance of his 

 daily doings was also magnificent, and is 

 equalled only by the naivete of the narrative 

 in which the daily doing-s are recorded. 



From Paris he went to Italy, still accom- 

 panied by the faithful mother, whose apron 

 strings were slow to untie, whichever way he 

 pulled them. At Naples, it came over him 

 that he was not securing the education for 

 which he had crossed the ocean — but on this 

 point we venture to disagree. He climbed 

 Vesuvius and gathered its minerals; he ex- 

 hausted the family letter of credit, but soon 

 prevailed upon a discriminating banker to ad- 

 vance needed f imds ; he went to Rome and had 

 an interview with the Pope; and then to 

 Florence. There waking one morning with a 

 wish to wander forth in search of new educa- 

 tional experience, he took leave of his mother 

 for a day or two and set out for Leghorn, with 

 a letter of credit in his pocket for baggage. 

 By the merest chance he went from Leghorn 

 to Corsica, where he spent four months like 

 a knight-errant in the Middle Ages; first en- 

 joying an idyll — platonic — with a forester's 

 young French wife, who sang to him of spring 

 and youth; then roving over the wild moun- 

 tains with shepherds and bandits galore ; mean- 

 while keenly using his eyes and writing a few 

 explanatory letters to his mother, which the 

 trusty mountaineers failed to post. 



Finally returning to Italy, as thoughtless 

 as Theseus though with no Ariadne, he found 

 his distressed parent, who instead of class- 

 ically leaping from the Leghorn rocks, had as 

 fruitlessly set the police looking for her lost 

 boy all over Europe. She embraced but did 

 not upbraid him, and the happy pair went to 

 Vienna, where education was again taken 

 under consideration; and from Vienna, on the 

 advice of the osculatory old Noeggerath, the 

 youth of nineteen went, to Freiberg, with the 

 beginnings of a beard that became famous in 

 later life. On the way there at Dresden the 

 apron strings were at last untied ; the mother 

 turned homeward alone and the son turned 

 seriously to his studies — at least as seriously 

 as any one studied in the Freiberg of that 



