42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The work translated was Biot's " Traite de Physique/' and the budding 

 scientist sagely questions 



If the Oken-Schelling Philosophy could have shown anything of that fine 

 scientific correlation of optical phenomena which Biot presented with so much 

 clearness. 



What were the requirements for a lectureship in physics at Leipzig 

 in the year of grace 1824, the writer can not say, but in that year, aged 

 23, Fechner began lecturing on that subject, his published work up to 

 that time consisting of two essays by Dr. Mises, a cram-book of physiol- 

 ogy and a text-book of logic for school use. But whatever Fechner's 

 qualifications when he took the lectureship, he speedily became a skill- 

 ful experimentalist and investigator. It was a time when the scat- 

 tered observations in electricity and magnetism were beginning to be 

 bound up into connected theory. In 1824 Oersted discovered the at- 

 traction of the galvanic current for the magnet; it was in this decade 

 that Faraday was making his classical researches on the action of in- 

 duced electric currents and that Ohm announced the famous law of 

 electric force which bears his name. Into this broad and rapid scien- 

 tific movement Fechner threw himself with all his tireless zeal, and ex- 

 cluding his translations of French chemical and physical works, pub- 

 lished in the period between 1828 and 1848 no less than 21 investiga- 

 tions on electricity and magnetism, devoted mostly to testing the laws 

 and theories of the electric current, especially the fundamental facts 

 underlying the great law of Ohm. The generous equipment of ingeni- 

 ous apparatus, which we are wont to find in German laboratories, was 

 wanting in Fechner's day, so that he had in these investigations to 

 patch out his equipment at his own expense and often with home-made 

 devices, but "despite these drawbacks," says his biographer, Kurd 

 Lassowitz, himself a physicist, "he succeeded," through skillful and 

 careful arrangements of his measurements, together with his tireless 

 industry, in obtaining results of surprising accuracy, and Wundt testi- 

 fies that, even to-day, Fechner's measurements of the galvanic battery 

 may be safely commended to any one looking for a model of logical 

 method in the domain of natural science. 



But beside the electrical investigations, his activity in other kinds 

 of work was unceasing; a bulky Haus Lexikon in 8 volumes, of which 

 he wrote fully a third, a pharmaceutical journal, of which he was at 

 once editor and chief contributor, so-called translations of which he was 

 as much author as translator, text-books in physics and chemistry — his 

 literary and scientific output in this period alone would have insured 

 him no small amount of space in any future Haus or Konversations- 

 Lexikon of his fatherland. 



But the load was too heavy for him to carry, and the straw, or rather 

 bale, which finally broke him down was the bulky Hauslexikon. In 



